


Damaged

by pepperclay



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:27:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 36,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25212391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pepperclay/pseuds/pepperclay
Summary: One of the senshi becomes lost, presumed dead in a battle with the Dark Kingdom. Lacking any explanation for what happened to her, officials turn their attention to the other girls, and their lives fall apart. (Archived story by Elizabeth Tuckwood, made in 97.)
Relationships: Chiba Mamoru/Tsukino Usagi
Kudos: 3





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> Note from editor: This story is by Elizabeth Tuckwood that while is archive on the site it's orginally on, I am putting it on here for archival purposes. And slightly editing the format so it's easier to read/splitting the story into parts.
> 
> Original author's note: Okay, let's see. I guess the standard disclaimers come first. Sailor Moon and related characters are the property of Naoko Takeuchi and more corporations than I can keep track of. This story is meant for entertainment, not profit. The story itself is mine (Wow-does this mean I get to say something like "Story copyright 1997 by Elizabeth Tuckwood"? Oooh.).

1.

*beep*

Mmm?

*beep*

Roll over. Hit alarm clock.

*beep*

Not the alarm clock.

*beep*

Communicator alarm. Maybe I could just pretend-

*beep*

All *right* already!

*bee-*

"Yeah? What **is** it . . . Amy? Do you know what time-?"

"I've figured it out," Amy interrupts, totally ignoring my question. Also totally ignoring little pleasantries like 'hello' or 'how are you?' or 'sorry to wake you up at 4:30 am.' This is not a good sign. "I'm going to run the program at 6:43. We'll be at the construction site." And she signs off before I can say a word.

It's a carefully calculated maneuver on Amy's part. She knows perfectly well that if I leap out of bed right this minute, I **may** be able to get there by 6:00, but if I miss a connection, I won't arrive until 6:30. Which will give me thirteen minutes to try to convince her not to make the second worst mistake of her life.

For about half a second I seriously consider just staying home. I mean, what good will it do if I go? She knows I don't approve of what she's doing. But my showing up isn't really a question. If she fails-which is highly likely-she's going to be crushed. Then she's going to need us to help her out, right? Tell her it's going to be all right, offer her our shoulders to cry on, pry the computer out of her hands before she takes her frustrations out on it-that sort of thing.

And then, of course, she might actually succeed. In which case she'll need us to keep from getting herself killed.


	2. 2

2.

Somewhere, there are gods smiling upon me. This is the only reason I can think of for getting here at 6:00. Even so, the others are already here.

The construction site hasn't changed much. First there were rumors of demon-sightings, detailed enough to make even construction workers nervous. Then the police tore the place apart looking for evidence of foul play. Now people say that a dead body is buried somewhere on the property. This last bit of gossip was enough to drive investors away, so the company that owns the site went out of business. So, except for having a lot more weeds, it's still like I remember it: just a chain-link fence surrounding a large pit with a concrete foundation at the bottom.

I'm kind of surprised to see Serena and Luna. You can't get Serena up in time for school, so how did Amy persuade her to show up this early? Heck, how did Amy even wake her up enough to make her understand what was going on? Then I think about why we're here. For this, Amy could wake her up at any hour. And Serena actually looks awake, which is more than I can say for Mina. Mina's lucky Artemis came with her or I suspect she'd have ended up on the other side of town. Even so, somewhere along the line, she woke up enough to transform to Sailor Venus. Actually, I'm the only one here who hasn't transformed. It's stubbornness on my part. It's like, if I don't change, I don't have to admit that I'd even consider going through with this.

Amy's not paying attention to any of us. She's off to one side, perched on a concrete block, head bent over her computer. Probably triple-checking her calculations, or something.

All right, so how do I talk Amy out of this? You can't argue with smiles, nods, doesn't disagree with anything you say-and then turns around and keeps on doing whatever she damn well pleases. If she would just get angry, or yell, or even just politely tell me to butt out, then maybe I could get somewhere, but how do you fight with someone who won't fight back? Every time she gives me that little apologetic smile, I want to wipe it off her face . . . and then I feel really guilty for even thinking such a thing.

Well, I've got to make one more attempt. It's not going to work, but if Amy's actually gotten the program right and one of us gets hurt, I'll never forgive myself if I don't try. So, shoving my hands in my pockets, I walk up behind her.

I know she hears me coming-I'm not trying to be subtle about it-but she doesn't look up.

"Hi, Lita."

"Um, hi."

And I can't think of anything to say. I've said everything by now. I've yelled at her, pleaded with her, ordered her to do something else, and nothing has worked.

I wind up just looking down at the back of her head. I wish I could get mad at her. She's putting everyone in danger with this experiment of hers, so it should be easy to be angry, but I can't. I just want her to be all right again. She's definitely looking thinner, and I bet if I could see her face, she'd have those dark circles under her eyes again.

"When was the last time you ate, Mercury? Or slept?"

"Huh?" Now she turns around and looks at me. I was right about the dark circles. "Oh, that. I had a sandwich earlier today-"

"Earlier **today?** Amy, it's not even dawn yet! You haven't slept at all tonight, have you?"

She blinks in confusion. I don't think she's pulled her mind out of her calculations quite yet. I open my mouth to tell her that she shouldn't even be considering this if she's half-starved and sleep-deprived, when Serena joins in.

"Mercury, are you all right?"

Whatever else has gone wrong, I can't say that Serena doesn't care about us. But I'm a little more hopeful than I was a minute ago. Amy will still listen to Serena. If Serena would just **lead** us for once, she could stop Amy before this goes any further.

"I'm fine. Really. Don't worry about me." She smiles at Serena. I suppose she's trying to be reassuring, but I just feel sick. It's not that Amy's being self-destructive or anything, but when she gets into her computations, she forgets to eat or sleep. Judging from the shade of the bluish smudges under her eyes, I'd say she's forgotten to sleep for maybe more than one night.

_Dammit, Serena,_ _**look** _ _at her! She's in no condition to do this. Tell her to go home and get some sleep and a decent meal, and we'll try again tomorrow . . ._

"Are you sure?"

We've lost. Serena's going to back down. Mina is pretending that she hasn't heard a word of this. For some reason, Luna and Artemis have never interfered in these sorts of discussions between Amy and me, so Amy wins again. If you can call talking your friends into letting you endanger your life 'winning.'

"Lita, I need your help."

Well, this is a new approach. I don't see why she thinks I'm going to help her do something this stupid, but I'm willing to hear her out. Maybe if she talks too long, we'll miss her magic minute and she'll have to wait for another time.

"I need you to send a thunderbolt into the Portal. My calculations will tell me where the Portal should be, but I need energy to pry it open again."

"Are you crazy?! Do you honestly think I'm going to **help** you commit suicide?" So much for rational debate. Oh well, I was never very good at it anyway. "Get Sailor Venus to do it." Mina is no more likely to help her with this than I-

"She says my Crescent Beam isn't strong enough on its own," Mina interjects. She's looking much more alert now. "I'd have to use two of them, and it'd take too long to get the second one ready. It throws the timing off, or something like that. She needs one burst of enough power to open the Portal."

"You're actually willing to try this? I don't believe it! Mina, this is insane!"

" **Is** it?" Amy stands up and looks me in the face. There's a hard glint in her eyes that it takes me a minute to recognize: fury. In the last minute, I've implied that she's both suicidal and nuts. She's running on little food and no sleep, which isn't helping matters. She's under a hell of a lot of stress, convinced that she has to get this program perfect, and that she has to do so in the next few minutes.

I have finally gotten Amy angry. Now what do I do?

"Listen to me, Lita Kino." Her voice is tight and perfectly controlled. "I have devoted the past two **years** of my life to getting this program to work. I now know more about computers, computer programming, and Negaverse physics than even **I** ever wanted to know. I have dropped courses in biology and chemistry to make room for more physics and computer classes in my schedule. This isn't getting me any closer to becoming a pediatrician. My grades have plummeted. My mother is worried sick about me, only I can't really tell her why I've suddenly started behaving like this, now can I? At 6:43 I am

running this program, if I have to use Crescent Beams or even nothing at all. You are not going to stop me short of physically picking me up and carrying me home, and if you try, you will have to fight ice and fog the entire way. You can disagree with me, but don't you dare call me insane unless you can come up with a better idea as to how to make this work." Her voice begins to waver.

"All you have done is try to pretend that no one was to blame for this, that we should just forget about it and move on. I **cannot** just forget about it! I have to try to do something! If you don't like my ideas, then tell me, just what would you suggest I **do**?"

Absolute silence. The others are staring at us in shock. **How** can I get through to her? We've been over and over this, and nothing ever changes, and Amy . . . Amy is . . .

"Amy, Raye is dead. You can't help her by getting yourself killed. You can't make it better by throwing your own life and dreams away." My throat tightens, but I manage to keep talking. "Please, Amy, can't we just go home?"


	3. Chapter 3

3.

Naturally, it was the Negaverse that got us into this mess. Their latest attack started out quietly. Raye encountered a youma when she was at the mall. It was so weak that she didn't have much trouble doing it in by herself. I mean, she called us, but it was just a small cloud of powder drifting away by the time Serena showed up to help.

There didn't seem to be any pattern to their attacks. Youma would appear here and there throughout Tokyo, drain a few people of energy, and sometimes get away and sometimes not. They didn't seem to be answering to any commander, not like Queen Beryl's people.

They might not have been very organized, but it didn't take long for us to figure out that they were multiplying. They weren't going to need to be organized if this kept up. Jedite and the other generals of the Negaverse had been considerate enough to attack only one location at a time. These youma started attacking more than one place at the same time, forcing us to either ignore one entirely or risk the dangers of splitting up.

Amy and Raye joined forces to track the youma down, Amy analyzing data and Raye going for the psychic method. They realized that the youma were entering our world from only one location. This left us with a choice: we could track individual youma and fight them one by one, or we could try to cut them off at the source.

We all agreed that closing the gateway between the worlds was probably the best solution. After all, who knew how many youma might be waiting to drop by for a quick energy snack? If we tried to fight them once they got here, we'd just keep missing some attacks and innocent people would keep on getting hurt.

The Portal turned out to be in a construction site. The youma had had the sense not to actually attack anyone at the site itself and draw attention to their secret entrance. However, someone had probably glimpsed them, because it sounded like the site had recently gotten a reputation for being haunted. Mina said that it was on her way to a friend's house, and that for the past month or so, she hadn't seen a single worker there. At least that meant that we didn't have to try to dodge security.

The site itself wasn't all that exciting. When I'd checked the site out earlier in the afternoon, I'd been able to see some concrete flooring and walls, and that was about it. Now at night, I discovered that we weren't going to be able to see a thing because no one had bothered to put in security lighting. Or maybe the youma had sabotaged it?

"Um . . . where **is** the Portal?" Serena had a point. The last gateway into the Negaverse I'd seen had been pitch black-not easy to see in the dark.

"Mercury? Can you get readings on it?"

"I'm trying." Amy had activated her visor and was scanning the area. She was probably the only one of us who could see anything. I could sort of make out the white parts of our costumes in the light of a distant streetlight, but other than that, I was lost. "It's not open at the moment, so there's not much to look for."

"Let's hope it's near the ground. Do any of you feel like trying to climb girders in the dark?"

"That's not funny, Mars." Serena was beginning to sound nervous. Big surprise there. "Maybe we could come back after school tomorrow?"

"Wait a minute . . . yes, there it is! It's on the other side of the pit."

"Of course it is," muttered Mina. "Can anyone see well enough to keep us from falling **into** the pit?"

"Where's your sense of adventure?" Now that it looked like we might see some action, Raye was getting an adrenaline rush.

"At home with Luna, safely tucked into a nice warm bed," whined Serena. "Which is where I wish I was. Why can't we ever start these missions at noon?"

"You mean you'd rather chase down minions of the Negaverse than listen to your teacher go on and on about what a lousy student you are? Wow. Hey guys, Sailor Moon's got some guts after all."

"You're realllly lucky it's too dark to see you, Mars. I-"

"Will you two shut up?" If I let them get going, we'd still be standing there when the sun came up. "The whole point of doing this in the middle of the night was to surprise them, remember? If you two are going to yell at each other, Mars might as well make a fireball to light our way with!"

"My visor lets me see pretty clearly. Hold hands and I'll get us around the edge."

I deliberately moved between Serena and Raye, placing Raye at the end of the line. I wouldn't have put it past Raye to work off some nervous energy by threatening to push Serena in, and we didn't have time to calm Serena down if she became hysterical.

It took us about five minutes to work our way around to the other side of the pit. I didn't think we would have been hurt if we'd fallen in, but it would have been a delay, and anyway, I wasn't wild about the idea of falling into a hole I couldn't see the bottom of.

This side of the construction site was even darker than where we'd just been. Serena had my left hand in a death grip. I was kind of surprised to realize that Raye was holding my right hand nearly as tightly. Having just lectured Raye and Serena about teasing each other, I couldn't resist the temptation myself.

"Scared, Mars?" I whispered.

"What? Not at all!" She jerked her hand away from mine so hard that she nearly yanked me into the pit. I just barely managed to keep a grip on her fingers.

"Cut it out. If you let go entirely, we'll never find you again." Before she could stop herself, she'd clutched my hand. All right, it was a little mean, but Raye could handle it. And anyway, Amy would have found her . . . eventually.

"If you move forward about three feet, you can let go of each other's hands," Amy murmured. "The ground widens out here."

Just as quietly, Mina asked, "So where's the Portal? Are we supposed to be able to see it now?"

"Not unless we open it. It's invisible when it's closed."

"Do we have to open it at all? It would be safer to seal it without letting anyone on the other side know we're here."

"I don't think we have a choice. Something on the other side is

controlling it. If we just seal it from this side, they could probably reopen it, or open another one not far away. We've got to destroy what opened it in the first place."

"Which means we go in, doesn't it?" I groaned.

"Scared, Jupiter?" Raye asked maliciously.

"Yes," I snapped. "If I remember right, the last time we tried to get into the Negaverse, we all got killed. Do you think I **want** to risk that again? Look, I'm not saying I won't do it. But knowing I have to do something isn't the same thing as wanting to do it, and I don't have to sound happy about it."

_Oh, that was brilliant, Lita. Admit you're scared when Serena's close enough to hear you. Now she'll be too terrified to think straight!_ But what little I could see of Serena's face didn't look all that scared-just sad. Of course. She'd had to watch us all die, and I'd just reminded her of that fact. Between depressing her and nearly scaring Raye into throwing me into the pit, I was doing just fine tonight.

When Amy spoke again, she sounded a little more hesitant. "So do we want to go through with this? If we're going to change our minds, we'd better do it before we open the Portal."

"Yes." Mina sounded confident, but Mina always sounded confident. "Like she said, we may not like it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have to be done." Did I say that? Why did it sound so much more inspiring when Mina said it?

"Let's do it!" Trust Raye to sound like a motivational seminar. "We'll show that Negatrash they can't mess with the Sailor Scouts!"

"What do you think?" Mina asked Amy.

"I believe that this is our best chance. We've already discussed going after the youma one at a time, and we've agreed that there aren't enough of us to do that well. But if we're going to seal the Portal, I will have to get close enough to the device that is keeping it open to analyze it." She paused.

"However . . . that does not mean that we all have to go."

"No." For a moment, I thought that Serena had decided to veto our plan, but she wasn't finished. "We're a team, Mercury. You'll have the best chance of doing all your math stuff in peace if the rest of us come with you to scare the youma off, right?" She didn't wait for Amy to answer. "So that's settled, then. Go on-how do we open the Portal from the outside?"

Amy immediately let loose with a stream of technobabble that was unfit for our delicate ears. She must have seen the blank looks on our faces however, for she broke off. "I stand here and send signals to the Portal until I find one that opens it."

"Any ideas as to how long that's going to take?" I asked.

I saw a flicker of motion that might have been a shrug. "It's difficult to say. But I don't think it can be too hard to figure out. Many youma seem to be not all that intelligent, so the procedure can't have too many steps. And as for security . . . well, how many people would wish to break into the Negaverse?"

_Nobody with any sense,_ I thought sourly. Apparently we were in for a bit of a wait. I started to pace, then remembered how close we were to the edge of the pit. Moving further away from it might not be a bad idea. Cautiously I groped around until I found the chain-link fence, leaned back against it, and let myself slide down into a crouch, shifting slightly when the bow on my outfit pressed uncomfortably into my back.

I hadn't thought that we'd be waiting. The plan had been to show up, get in, get out, go home, and try to get enough sleep to keep from drifting off during classes tomorrow. Now I had time to think about what we were getting ourselves into, and it was proving to be a mistake.

_Calm down. You're *not* going to die. No one is going to die. We're all more experienced than we were the last time we tried this. We were overconfident then. Now we'll know to be extra careful. And anyway, none of these youma have been as strong as Malachite, and we beat him, didn't we?_

_'We' didn't beat Malachite. 'We' never even touched him._ _ **Serena's**_ _the one who wasted him,_ I argued with myself. _Anyway, Malachite's not the reason I didn't make it last time._

If I kept thinking along these lines, I'd never get myself through the Portal.

I could hear Mina and Serena talking quietly about something, but it seemed like they were a million miles away. Amy was tapping away on her computer, oblivious to the world. They weren't that far away, but it felt like I was all alone.

The fence shook as someone else grabbed it and then dropped down to join me.

"Hey . . . you all right?" Raye.

"I hate waiting."

"Mmm."

Serena and Mina had wandered over to see how Amy was coming along. I wondered if they could figure out what she was doing without asking her anything.

"Mars? How did you . . . I mean . . . weren't you . . . blast it, I'm not saying this right!"

We were outside. Why wasn't there enough air to breathe?

"The last time . . . you must have known you probably weren't going to survive a fight with two of those youma, even if you *do* throw a majorly intense fireball. I mean, none of us have talked about it all that much, but I know Serena tried to make all of you go home after I . . . died. So you could have done that. And you didn't."

I was beginning to wish I'd never brought the subject up. I wasn't even sure what I was trying to say.

"And you want to know why we didn't?" Raye asked softly.

I was the first to die. I'd never know if I would have had the courage to go on and confront the Doom 'n Gloom Girls after watching Raye or Mina or Amy die. And I wanted to know the answer before we went back in, before the others' lives depended on me. What if I froze or something and got them killed?

It was like Raye knew what I was thinking. "But you were the first. You were willing to die if you could take them with you, and you didn't even have one of us for inspiration or anything. Okay, 'inspiration' isn't a good word for it-it makes it sound like you were having fun or something-but you know what I mean."

"I didn't know."

"Huh?"

"We'd never tried anything like that before. One minute, I'm slogging through snow; the next minute, I'm way up in the sky, barely able to breathe because those tentacles were so tight, and then they were hurting me, and I just didn't **think.** It just seemed like I'd have a better chance of getting them with a thunderbolt because I was so close to them than Serena or you would have trying to aim from the ground. *I didn't know we could be killed by our own powers . . . *"

"Oh, Lita . . . "

"Pretty stupid, huh? I mean, even if the thunderbolt hadn't fried me, falling onto those ice shards would have finished me off. So the minute they dragged me into the air, I was doomed. And I know this now, but then I thought it was just going to be one of our 'normal' fights, and I don't want to die again, Raye- "

I clapped a hand over my mouth. Another second, and I'd start sounding like Serena. I couldn't deal with Raye calling me a crybaby like she did Serena, not right then. _I shouldn't have teased her about being scared . . ._

She didn't say anything for a minute. My heart was pounding and I tried to make myself breathe. And then I felt her take my other hand and squeeze it reassuringly.

"It didn't feel like we had a choice," she whispered. "We're supposed to protect Serena and the Crystal. Even if we'd given up, Queen Beryl was getting ready to destroy the Earth, so we wouldn't have been safe anywhere. It was like, I could fight the Doom 'n Gloom Girls and try to make sure Serena lived even though I'd probably die, or follow her back to Tokyo and we'd both die. And I **can't** let her die if I know there's something I can do to stop it. It's impossible-my mind won't even go around the thought. Can yours?"

I tried. She was right. It was the weirdest thing-I literally could *not* make myself imagine allowing Serena to come to serious harm if there was a chance of saving her.

"See what I mean? So think of it this way: if she goes into the Negaverse without us, what do you think her chances of survival are?"

"What chances?" I muttered. But suddenly everything seemed different somehow. At least I could breathe again. Whatever else this said about what it meant to be a Sailor Scout, I'd worry about it later. After **all** of us returned from the Negaverse.

"Mars?"

"Hmm?"

"Thanks."

"No problem," she said lightly, letting go of my hand. "Just doing my part to keep team spirits up." She raised her voice a bit. "Which is really something **our leader** should be doing, only she's too busy bothering Sailor Mercury."

"Are you saying I'm not doing my share?" Serena griped.

"Do you even know what I was talking about?" Raye countered. "You were talking to them-or do you have enough brains to listen to two different conversations at once?"

Sigh.

Before they could get into another of their arguments, Amy cut them off. "Stand back. The Portal's starting to open."

Time to go. I stood up, stretching to get the kinks out of my legs, and started to walk towards the others.

"Jupiter!" Raye hissed.

I turned back. "What?"

"I'm stuck!"

"Stuck?"

"Yes, **stuck**. My outfit's caught on the fence somehow."

"You're kidding." But even in the dark, I could see that she was in an awkward position, half-standing, half-crouching. "You're not kidding."

"Well, **help** me!"

I snickered.

"This isn't funny!"

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather have Sailor Moon help you? You were just saying something about how a leader should do her part for her teammates . . . "

"Don't you *dare* call her over here, Jupiter! Now help me get this untangled."

"Aren't you even going to ask nicely?"

**"Jupiter!"**

"I'm sorry. I didn't quite catch that."

"SailorJupiter,willyou **please** helpmegetthisdressfreefromthefence?" she mumbled.

"See? That wasn't so hard, now was it?"

"I'm going to get you for this."

"Watch it. You'd better be nice to me until I get this untangled. Where's it caught, anyway?"

"At the back! Where do you **think** -" I smothered another giggle as she caught herself and muttered, "I'm very sorry to have yelled at you like that, Sailor Jupiter. Please accept my most abject apologies. The outfit is caught at the back. I'm afraid I'll rip the skirt off if I pull too hard. I would be eternally grateful if you would be so kind as to work it free. **Thank** you." I could feel her glaring at me. "Was that humble enough for you?"

She had done a pretty good job of attaching herself to the fence. From what I could get my hands on, it felt like her bow had gotten itself wrapped around several strands of wire. I pulled at it experimentally. It wasn't going to slip free easily. Perhaps if I could have seen what I was doing, I could have disentangled her, but it was too dark, and I couldn't really feel anything well with gloves on. Besides, we didn't have time to be fussy. I grabbed the bow in one hand, the skirt in the other, and yanked.

_**Riiippp.** _

Raye staggered forward. "What did you-you ripped off my bow?"

"Would you have preferred it if I'd left you stuck to the fence? Or should I have torn your skirt off instead?"

"YOU RIPPED OFF MY BOW?!"

"Mars, get a grip! The Negaverse is waiting for us, and you're worried about one lousy red bow?"

She started gasping incoherently.

"What are you so upset about? You know the outfit will repair itself the next time you transform to Sailor Mars." Oops. Bad suggestion. She might decide she had to transform right then and there. "Come ON! Look, if you're so obsessed about this bow, we'll come back tomorrow in the daytime and rescue it. But for now, we've got to get a move on!" And with that, I grabbed her arm and dragged her forward to where the others were waiting by the Portal.

"You've decided to join us on this little adventure after all?" Mina inquired.

"Sorry about the delay. Mars got-ow!" The brat pinched me!

"Are you two all right?" Serena asked warily.

"Oh, we're just **fine** ," Raye said tightly. "For the moment anyway. I'm not making any long-term promises about **her** health."

"What happened to your uniform?" Amy wondered.

"Huh? I can't see anything. Did Mars do something to her-?"

"Look, Meatball-Head, do you want to do this or not?" Raye snarled. I could have told her not to bother. The minute we got into any light, even Serena was going to be able to figure out what had happened. But she did manage to distract Serena into another fight.

And on that note of perfect harmony, we entered the Negaverse.


	4. Chapter 4

4.

"It's not that I want to rush you or anything, Mercury," Mina called from the cave entrance, "but we've got company."

We had been in the Negaverse for about an hour and a half, and I was thoroughly sick of it. The first half-hour had been spent trying to find thisplace: a small cave that held the device that maintained the Portal. Well, Amy was calling it a device. To me, it just looked like a metallic grey ball about

three feet in diameter floating about a foot off the ground. Grey was certainly the right color for it. Everything here was grey. Flat grey land filled with huge grey rocks and the occasional cliff, and a cold, strong wind that hadn't let up since we came through the Portal. If Negaverse weather was always like this, no wonder Queen Beryl had wanted to take over our universe.

We had planned a nighttime attack in order to surprise anyone who might be waiting for us on the other side. We needn't have bothered. For one thing, we had yet to see anyone. And it wasn't night on this side of the Portal. Or maybe it was. Actually, it had looked like twilight ever since we'd gotten here. It wasn't cloudy, there was light in the sky, but the sun wasn't up.

After this long, shouldn't it have either changed to night or day?

The minute we had popped through the Portal, Amy had started trying to trace the device, or its signal, or something. I think she told us, but it was hard to hear her over the wind. So when she started working her way between the rocks, I just trailed along after everyone else and hoped I'd know what to do when we got to wherever we were going.

After a few wrong turns, Amy finally found the device in a cave that looked like every other cave we'd passed. She'd immediately settled down to analyze it. All I could think was that we were stuck doing more waiting. So Mina, Raye, and I had started taking turns standing at the cave entrance keeping watch. Serena kind of drifted from one of us to the next, starting idle conversations; we tried to keep her from talking to Amy and distracting her.

It looked like we were finally going to see some action. I couldn't decide if I was glad the waiting was over or terrified that something horrible was going to happen. Raye, Serena, and I all moved to the opening for a better look.

"Get back!" Mina pushed us away, moving back herself. "In this place, any color shows up like a neon sign! If they haven't noticed us yet, let's not make it easy for them."

Amy looked up from her computer, frowning. "Do you think they've seen us? I can put some fog in the entrance if it'll help."

"Do it," Raye commanded. "Venus is right-our uniforms can probably be seen from a mile away. And then get back to your computing, because I think we're going to have to leave soon!"

"Mercury . . . Bubbles . . . BLAST!"

I decided they'd never see us through the fog. Unfortunately, it also blocked our view of them. And fog looked to be about as rare around here as color. How long before someone noticed that one cave was suddenly filled with the stuff?

Not long, apparently. I'd forgotten the damn wind. Amy's fog was rapidly being sucked out the entrance and dissipating.

"How long before you can destroy that thing?" Mina's expression was grim.

"I don't like the idea of being trapped in here."

"It has to be done just right," Amy muttered. "I need to put a time delay in it. If it blows too soon, we're in here with them for the rest of our lives."

"And how long would that be?" Serena looked kind of sick. "Five minutes?"

"How much time will it take to get back to the Portal?" Surely it had to be shorter than half an hour. I had serious doubts as to how long we could keep up a full-scale fight.

Amy brightened slightly. "I kept a record of how we got here. I estimate approximately fifteen minutes."

"And how much longer if we have to stop every three seconds to blast something?" Raye was peering out the entrance. I realized the fog was almost gone. "That's a mob out there, and they've definitely seen us."

"Got it!" Amy crowed. "I'm delaying the destruction, routing a signal through the computer. When we get back to the Portal, I'm the last one out. It should close five seconds after I send the final signal."

"Five **seconds**?" Serena nearly howled. "Mercury, is that going to be enough time? We are **not** leaving you here!"

"I plan to stand right next to the Portal," Amy argued. "You leave first. I send the signal, and then leap through myself. The longer I delay, the more opportunities there will be for youma to follow us through, and we may be in no condition to deal with them when we return to our world."

"Well, if we don't leave now, we won't have to worry about it at all," Raye snapped. "Come on!"

That return trip was hellish. Probably the only thing that saved our lives was the fact that the main body of the youma hadn't cut us off from the Portal. Somehow I'd managed to forget just how many youma can float or fly. We couldn't outrun them, and we always had to beware of attacks from above.

We tried to protect Serena and Amy the most. Serena can do incredible things with the Moon Sceptre, but she's not very good at doing them on the run. That left her with her tiara as her only weapon, and it's never been terribly suited for fighting more than one enemy at a time. Amy, of course, was our ticket home. If she died, none of us were going to be able to get her computer to work, much less figure out how to close the Portal behind us.

Naturally, they tried to help. Serena took out a few youma with the tiara, but it seemed to take forever for it to return to her. After a while, I realized that that was exactly what was happening, that she was growing tired and her tiara was losing energy.

Amy managed to erect an ice wall that delayed some of the more land-bound youma. She was swaying afterwards. I couldn't understand how one Bubble Blast, an ice wall, and a quick jog had so utterly drained her until I saw her computer in her hand.

_You idiot! What do you think her computer runs on-penlight batteries? She's been using it all night, she's using it now, and it drains energy from her just like your thunderbolts take their charge from you!_

"No more magic, Mercury!" I screamed. "I can't carry you if you collapse, and you've **got** to make it back to the Portal!" I couldn't be sure she even heard me. A bad sign.

Serena retrieved her tiara for the umpteenth time, stared at it a moment, then jammed it back on her head. "I'll help Mercury," she yelled at us. "I'm not doing us much good anyway!" She grabbed Amy around the waist and threw Amy's free arm around her shoulders. Amy managed to lift her head enough to look around for a moment, then leaned against Serena who barely kept her upright.

"She says to go that way!" Serena pointed to our left. I was glad someone knew the way out of here. I was too busy trying to keep a path open in front of us to pay much attention to where we were going.

"There it is!" Mina shrieked over the wind. She was in the lead for the moment while Raye tried to catch her breath from a blow that had nearly thrown her back the way we'd just come. "It's . . .oh no. . . "

A second later I came around a large grey boulder and saw the Portal. And the new group of youma waiting for us in front of it. They'd led us here. No youma was dumb enough to leave us a mostly clear path to our only escape unless they knew that it wasn't an escape after all. They'd been playing with us. We'd used most of our strength getting here-there was a trail of dead, dying, and injured youma behind us to prove it-and there were enough of them to give us just as strong a battle now that we were exhausted.

Raye looked stunned. Serena was too scared even to cry. Still leaning against Serena, Amy wasn't looking up, but she had stiffened. Mina's face was an expressionless mask.

Of course there was only one thing to do. Like we had a choice?

"Stick together!" I yelled. "I think we're going out as a group or not at all." It wasn't hard to get anyone to follow my so-called plan. Each one of us had some very nasty memories about dying alone here, and no one wanted to repeat the experience.

Amy pushed herself away from Serena. "I'll make it! Use your tiara or something!"

I don't remember the next ten minutes clearly. I don't really want to. Amy managed to come up with another Bubble Blast. At least they couldn't see us as easily.

Flashes of memory . . .

. . . dodging one youma, Raye knocks Serena out of the path of another.

For some reason, the youma ignore them and start fighting each other . . .

. . . Amy focuses all her attention on her computer and almost absently

ducks under a fur-covered arm whose owner I blast with a thunderbolt . . .

. . . a youma throws itself through the Portal. Mina whirls, sends a

Crescent Beam back towards the mob behind us, and dives after it . . .

_One of us is out of here. Send Serena through!_

I remember that thought distinctly. The next moment, I grabbed Serena's waist, spun her around, and hurled her at the Portal. With typical grace, she plunged through.

"Go on!" Amy was screaming at me. As I looked up, a pair of youma slipped past me and jumped into the Portal.

"Where's Mars?"

"Don't worry about me! Get out of here!" Raye popped out from behind a boulder and sent a fireball into a small group of youma. She looked like she was having the time of her life. Or death, if we didn't get through the Portal soon.

"Not without you, I'm not! We're supposed to-ahh!" I grabbed my side, gasping from a blow I hadn't even seen coming.

" **I** will protect Mercury. **You** will get out of here! Mars . . . Fire . . . IGNITE!" Raye shrieked, incinerating the youma who'd nearly turned me into a shish kebab. "MOVE IT!" And with that, she flung herself forward.

"Mars, what are you **doing?!** The Portal's **this** way!" I froze, staring after Raye who had nearly vanished under a hail of arms.

Amy hit me.

It wasn't a hard blow-Amy was too exhausted to put much force behind it and she wasn't trying to actually hurt me-but I wasn't in great shape myself and I certainly wasn't expecting her to attack **me**. So when she got me in the stomach, it was enough to send me stumbling back a few steps, gasping for air.

Which put me too close to the Portal to stop. Trying to keep from falling over, I went tumbling back through it.

An instant of absolute darkness and silence-

-then I was flailing around, nearly blinded by the flash of one of Mina's Crescent Beams.

"Watch it!" Mina was aiming for something behind me. I dropped to the ground and rolled, just as a fistful of pretty-and deadly-blue flower petals exploded where my head had been.

At least it was quieter on this side of the Portal. Here we were, fighting for our lives, and my first real thought was _At least there's no wind over here!_ More youma had crossed over, and Mina and Serena were hard-pressed to stay ahead of them. Even as I clambered to my feet, Serena was activating the Moon Sceptre. Now that she wasn't running for her life, it was going to be a lot more effective.

Time had definitely passed. The sky had lightened just a bit, enough for me to be able to make out the absolute blackness of the Portal against the rest of the construction site. It was still wide open, and there was no sign of either Raye or Amy.

_Pay attention! You've got to help Serena and Mina. You can't do anything for the others right now!_

Taking a deep breath, I got ready to come up with another thunderbolt. Not that there were many left in me. I was so tired, I was barely staying upright.

There was movement in the Portal. A second later, a red and white striped youma sprang out.

_How did she get past-ack, don't think about that now! Blast her before she gets her act together and . . ._

She looked up and smiled. Then she screamed, "Kandikaine!"

Some youma aren't into conversation. Apparently Kandikaine was one of these, because she didn't say anything else.

"Jupiter . . ." I began.

I was too slow. I knew this, even as Kandikaine raised her arm and pointed at me. The red spiralling stripe on her arm suddenly lifted off her skin and unwound, jabbing right at me. I gave up on trying to call a thunderbolt, and dove for the ground. The red stripe just barely missed the top of my head.

"Aggh . . . "

That wasn't Kandikaine. She looked absolutely delighted with herself. Still extended, the red stripe stiffened and began to glow. I whipped my head around and looked behind me.

Mina had been right behind me when I hit the ground. The red stripe had wrapped itself around her, pinning her arms to her sides. Even as I realized what had happened, she fell to her knees, only half-conscious.

I couldn't risk a thunderbolt. Not when all of us were this close together, not while Kandikaine was holding on to Mina. I didn't really think out a good attack. I just scrambled up again and tackled the youma.

I don't think she was expecting a non-magical attack. She fell backwards under my weight-and let go of Mina. The red stripe snapped back around her arm as we hit the ground. We rolled over twice before she managed to break away from me. Unfortunately she was in much better condition than I was at this point. She just bounced right back up to her feet. I was a lot slower. I'd only made it back to my hands and knees when Kandikaine kicked me in the side.

I tried to get away from her. I opted for moving sideways. It was a mistake. One moment I was scrabbling across cold dirt, and the next minute, there wasn't anything under my right hand. Overbalanced, I tumbled into the pit.

It took forever to hit the bottom. I rolled over and over, frantically trying to stop myself, and not having any luck. Still, I thought I might make it to the bottom in reasonably good condition (all things considered) until slamming into the foundation stopped my fall.

Stunned, I lay there and gasped for air. I had ended up on my back, wedged in between the outside of the foundation and the side of the pit. If I looked straight up, I could see the sky and the foundation but not much else.

As I finally started being able to breathe normally, my brain started working again too. It was slowly sinking in that Kandikaine might be on her way down at any minute, and that I wouldn't see her until it was too late if I just lay there. I had to get up-

**"Aahhgghhh-!"**

It felt like someone had stabbed a red-hot knife into my right arm. For a moment the world got kind of fuzzy around the edges. I froze, not moving until the pain died down enough for me to actually think.

The arm was definitely broken. Maybe when I hit the foundation?

 _Like it really matters when you broke it? C'mon, they need you up there!_ Telling myself that, I tried to get up again.

Same results, only worse. This time black spots started dancing in front of my eyes and my stomach started churning.

I lay back panting and stared at the sky. I could hear yelling and small explosions from the top, but from where I was, I couldn't see anything except colored flashes of light.

Mina and Serena were the only two Sailor Scouts I knew were up there, and Mina had barely been conscious when I'd last seen her. What if Amy and Raye hadn't made it out of the Portal yet? Until Amy closed the Portal, youma could just keep on coming through until Serena and Mina were toast. So, broken arm or no broken arm, I had to somehow get back to the top of the pit. Right?

I **wanted** to sit up. But this time, my body wouldn't even try. I just started shaking and I couldn't stop. But it wasn't until the flashes of light started getting all blurry that I realized I was crying.

_Stop it! They're_ _**dying** _ _up there, and all you can do is lie here and_ _**cry?** _

I hate crying. I hadn't done it since my parents died. I didn't cry when the Doom 'n Gloom Girls killed me, so why was I sobbing over just a broken arm? But I just lay there and cried and shook and tried to keep from throwing up and my arm kept hurting worse and worse and I couldn't tell if any of them were still alive . .


	5. Chapter 5

5.

"Sailor Jupiter? Are you down here?"

I must have fallen asleep or something, because I didn't remember hearing anyone coming down the hill. For a moment I didn't recognize the voice, and I gasped, thinking that a youma might have found me.

"Jupiter!" Darien's voice. Closer now. I opened my eyes and found him squatting down next to me. How did he always manage to come through horrible battles looking so neat and clean afterwards? I must have been out of it for a while: the sun had risen since the last time I'd looked at the sky.

"What happened?" I croaked. "Are they all right? Is-" Just then Darien reached out and put his hands on my shoulders, probably meaning to help me up. Too bad he moved my arm. I cried out. If it hadn't hurt so much, it would have been funny seeing him whip his hands away like I'd burned him.

"Arm's broken," I managed. "Hurts."

He nodded. He looked at me for a second, then turned and studied the side of the pit. Then he sighed. "Sorry. I don't think we can get you out of here without it hurting a lot more."

"Figured as much." I swallowed. "Look, let's get this over with, okay? I'm gonna chicken out if I have time to think about this."

A shadow of a smile crossed his face. "Right. Here goes."

It wasn't pleasant. Inspired by what I'd done to Raye's bow, we ripped off my bow and turned it into a weird sort of sling. It kept the arm from moving as much, but we didn't have anything to splint it with. Eventually Darien ended up carrying me, which was sort of embarrassing, but we both knew I wasn't going to be able to climb back up to the top. It hurt enough that I didn't think about why he hadn't answered any of my questions.

When we got to the top, Darien put me down very carefully. I leaned against him, hoping my legs would support me, and trying to work up the courage to look around. He didn't let go until I took a shaky step forward and looked up.

_They're alive!_

In the back of my mind, I had known that Serena, at least, had survived. If she had died, Darien wouldn't have probably remembered to look for me at all, much less have helped me out of the pit. But it wasn't exactly a cheerful scene.

Mina looked to be the worst off. She was lying on the ground near the fence, her head in Serena's lap. Serena had taken off one of her gloves, wadded it up, and was using it to try to stop Mina's head from bleeding. Judging from the amount of gore on the glove, she wasn't having much luck. Serena's own uniform was dirty and ripped, but Serena herself looked surprisingly healthy. When she heard us coming, she glanced up. An absolutely beautiful smile brightened her face when she saw me.

"Lita! You're all right! Mina, Lita's all right!" The smile vanished. "Mina? Come on, Mina, talk to me."

Mina mumbled something and tried to push Serena's hand away. When Serena looked up at us again, she looked a bit scared.

"She's not getting any better. I think this is serious, guys." Then she must have noticed my arm. "Oh, Lita, you're hurt too!"

"It's just a broken arm, Serena. Don't worry-all I need is a cast or something. It'll mend." I turned my head, trying to see Raye and Amy. Darien made a move towards Serena and Mina, then stopped and looked back at me. "Go on," I reassured him. "I promise I'll sit down if this gets too bad." I gave him the excuse he wanted to get back to Serena, but I didn't dare actually sit down-I didn't think I could get up again.

Amy was standing next to where the Portal had been, still working on her computer. I was kind of surprised that she hadn't collapsed yet. I could see dirt and blood on her, but like Serena, she basically looked fine. The Portal itself didn't seem to be there anymore, which absolutely thrilled me. I could live a long time without seeing another youma. But if it was sealed, what was she working on?

"Mercury?"

No answer. Amy has the most incredible concentration sometimes.

"Amy?"

"Huh? Lita! You're all right!" Wow. Just by being here, I was delighting so many people this morning. Amy moved towards me, meaning to hug me, but I fended her off.

"I appreciate the thought, but the arm won't stand for it."

She gasped. Unlike Serena, however, she did recognize that it wasn't a fatal injury. To distract her, I asked her about why she was still using her computer when she should be taking a nap or something. It wasn't much of a distraction. Her face tightened, and I could see her swallow with effort before she answered me.

"She's **gone.** "

Somewhere inside me, something started saying _Don't think about this, you don't want to know, just stop now . . ._

I turned my head, suddenly nervous. Serena, Mina, and Darien were back by the fence. Amy was next to me. Raye was . . .

"Where's Raye?"

The little voice inside me was getting louder. Amy didn't say anything.

"Amy? Where's Raye?"

She snapped the computer shut. Hugging herself, she turned away.

"Amy, . . . what . . . happened . . . to . . . Raye?"

"I . . . I thought she went through the Portal. Lita, I saw her go through the Portal, but we've looked everywhere, and she's not here!"

" **What** did you see? Tell me everything!"

Just then Serena came up behind us. She looked pale, but she was still in better shape than either me or Mina. "Darien's taking Mina to the hospital," she said tiredly. "At least we got her to transform back before she passed out."

"She'll be fine," I snapped. At least I knew where she was and that she was alive. "What happened to Raye?"

"Lita, I-" Serena began.

"I was by the Portal," Amy interrupted. Serena shut up instantly. "I knew Raye and I couldn't hold them back much longer. I was running the final part of the program. I got to the point where all I would need to do would be to enter one more command. While I was doing that, I saw Raye go past me through the Portal. I entered the final sequence and jumped into the Portal. Raye wasn't here when I got here."

"We've looked everywhere," Serena sighed. "Darien was looking for both of you when he was in the pit. He said he found you, but Raye's outfit would stand out really well against all that dirt, and he didn't see any sign of her."

It didn't make any sense. Until Amy sealed it, the Portal was working just like it was supposed to: letting people cross from Earth to the Negaverse and back again. Why would it suddenly not work for Raye? Had it dumped her on the other side of Tokyo or something?

Anyway, she probably wasn't dead. Darien would have found her body. At least youma conveniently turn into dust when they die so we weren't sitting in the middle of a pile of corpses.

Something about Amy's story was bothering me. I just couldn't figure out what it was. Everything sounded right. It should have worked. Why hadn't it?

My arm was starting to throb big-time. I bit my lip, trying to concentrate on Raye's disappearance to distract myself from the pain.

_Okay, Mina went through the Portal. I threw Serena in after her. I looked for Raye. She went and did one of those suicidal attacks that she does when she's really scared. While I watched her, Amy knocked me through. Then that youma came through and attacked me and Mina while Amy started her final-_

Amy hadn't mentioned seeing Kandikaine go by.

_Oh gods, no. Raye-_

I must have said that out loud. Serena whirled around.

"What? Spit it out: what happened to her?!"

"She's still . . . Amy, you didn't see her go by. You saw a red and white youma go through the Portal! **Raye's still in the Negaverse!"**

A look of absolute horror washed over Amy's face. I could see her mentally reviewing her last few minutes in the Negaverse. Serena just looked scared.

_Amy has the most incredible concentration sometimes . . ._

Amy could ignore World War III if she were programming a computer during it. I was sure she saw a red and white blur go by out of the corner of her eye and assumed that it was Raye's uniform, but she didn't take her eyes from the screen long enough to make absolutely sure. And so she followed Kandikaine through and sealed the Portal behind her, leaving the real Raye on the other side . . .

" **Open it!** We can't leave her there!" I wasn't making a lot of sense. With just three of us, and me injured, we wouldn't have stood a chance.

"I **can't!** I sealed the Portal **permanently!** " Despite what she was saying, Amy had flipped her computer open again and was frantically hitting the keys.

"Raye?" Serena's hand flew to her mouth. "She can't be . . . Raye, where **are** you? Raye? ANSWER ME!"

"I can't find it. There *isn't* any Portal any more!"

" **Do** something, Amy! She doesn't stand a chance in there alone!"

"Raye, **please!** "

Amy slowly stopped typing.

_She's giving up?!_

I grabbed Amy's wrist and yanked her around to face me. "Amy, what are you doing? We need to get the Portal open right now!"

"Aren't you listening to me? I **can't** open it again. It's sealed **permanently**!"

"You can't just **leave** her in there!" Amy tried to pull away. I

tightened my hold. "How could you? How could you not make sure that Raye went through the Portal?" Serena was trying to interrupt me. I ignored her. "How could you mistake a youma for one of your closest friends?" Amy started shaking her head and her eyes filled with tears. "You left Raye there to **die** , Amy!"

"Stop it!" Serena yelled. She grabbed my right arm. My next words turned into a shriek of pain. Serena didn't even wince. "Don't you dare blame her for this, Lita!"

Slowly I let go of Amy. She dropped her computer and started rubbing her wrist. Then her face crumpled and she started to cry.

Serena threw me a disgusted look and wrapped her arms around Amy. Amy wasn't making any noise. She just shook while Serena made comforting sounds. Serena glared at me over Amy's shoulder and mouthed something. I was pretty sure she was saying "Are you happy now?"

No.

I'd never felt so low in all my life. How could I have said something so horrible to one of my **friends**? Even if some of it was true, I should have just shut up and not said anything at all.

Between being hurt, drained, and feeling like I was dying of shame, I was starting to feel sick again. I slowly turned away from Amy and Serena and started heading for the gate to the construction site. I needed to get to a doctor. Though not as Sailor Jupiter. At least it didn't take a lot of effort to transform back. Unfortunately the bow vanished along with the rest of my uniform. My arm dropped.

_Poor Serena,_ I thought as I finally collapsed. _She'll want to take_ _care of both of us at once . . ._

Serena didn't have to choose after all. Amy suddenly pushed her away, scooped up her computer, and ran for the fence. She leaped over it and vanished.


	6. Chapter 6

6.

Amy showed up at her home that evening. Luna wanted to help somehow, and we figured Amy needed her more than Serena did, so she had staked out Amy's house. She didn't get a chance to talk to her alone though. Everyone's family knew that something was wrong, and since Amy didn't show up when the rest of us did, her mother had called the police. All Luna could report was that Amy had changed back from Sailor Mercury, but she looked to be on the point of collapsing with exhaustion and she hadn't done anything about her injuries.

They weren't bad enough to put her in the hospital, but Amy was still almost hysterical, and that got the police really interested in what was going on.

Mina was a lot more badly injured than any of us had figured. I'd thought all she'd have to do was have a doctor look at her and she'd be fine. Instead, she didn't wake up for two days, and only her parents were allowed to see her.

We were terrified that she'd die too. Artemis kept trying to get into her room, but cats stand out in hospitals, and they kept chasing him out. Serena finally got away from her family long enough to use the Luna Pen and change herself into a nurse, but she didn't know how to read a medical chart, so all she could do was whisper to Mina how much we'd miss her if she died. Then Mina's parents came in and Serena fled before she started crying again.

Even when Mina did wake up, things didn't go back to normal. In one sense, she was amazingly all right. She didn't have major brain damage or anything like that, and her head injury had been the worst thing she'd had, so she wasn't going to be permanently crippled.

She just couldn't remember what had happened.

Oh, she hadn't forgotten who she was, nothing as bad as that. We figured out that she didn't even forget being Sailor Venus. All she forgot was what happened between getting ready to go home from school the afternoon before we went into the Negaverse and waking up in the hospital. The doctors said that this wasn't all that strange considering she'd gotten a pretty good conk on the head. But they still wouldn't let us see her. They said they were afraid that we'd tell her that Raye had disappeared-or that she'd figure it out if Raye wasn't visiting her with us-and they didn't want to upset her until she was feeling stronger.

Trying to explain what had happened to Raye was impossible.

Everyone's parents knew, of course, that if the four of us were involved in something, Raye would have been right in the middle of it as well. They realized that Raye hadn't come back when we did. They wanted to know where she was. We didn't have a plausible answer.

What were we supposed to tell them? "Raye's dead. No, we can't actually show you the body"? Or maybe, "Raye was Sailor Mars, and Sailor Mercury-who's really Amy Mizuno-accidentally sealed her in this place called the Negaverse where everyone wanted to kill her"?

The absolute low point was having to tell her grandfather. We didn't have anything to tell him, which was probably worse. Raye always said his health wasn't the best, but you used to not be able to tell. Then it was like something broke inside him. Oh, he's still alive, but he got old. I mean, he **was** an older guy, but he didn't **act** old, not until she died.

And then it wouldn't end. The police decided to question us until they got some sort of answer that made sense. We didn't have one. They kept asking the same sorts of things. Had Raye been having problems with her grandfather? With Chad? Who was this Chad Kumada person anyway, and why was he living at the temple? What could we tell them about her relationship with Chad? Did she have a boyfriend? Did she run away from home? Were we covering for her? And when those questions didn't give them the answers they wanted, they came up with nastier ones. Had we been fighting? How did Mina and I **really** get those injuries? Why were we lying to them? And finally: did we kill Raye Hino?

Up until then, I'd sort of been getting sympathy because of my arm, and I played it for all it was worth. The police wanted to talk to my family, but I always managed to put them off. But when they began to suspect that Raye was dead, they insisted on talking to a legal adult. That's when I got into trouble.

My living situation wasn't exactly what you'd call standard. After my parents died, I discovered that tricking the keepers of my trust fund into giving me an allowance large enough to live on, pretending to be eighteen, and renting an apartment was lots easier than enduring the foster home I'd been put into. All right, I was probably being too optimistic to think that I could pull off living alone until I actually was eighteen. But after learning I was Sailor Jupiter, and all the stuff that happened after that, my living situation was one of the most normal parts of my life.

And then the police started looking for my legal guardian. Everything fell apart in a matter of hours. Child Protection Services whisked me away so fast, I hardly had time to blink, and they made it quite clear that I wasn't going to get to return to my apartment. The sympathy drained away noticeably.

Maybe it would have helped if I'd cried. Serena and Amy certainly didn't have any problem with tears. But it was like all of mine had been used up when I was lying in the pit. Figures. I didn't want them then, so I bawled like a baby. Now I felt really guilty because I wasn't crying for Raye, but I couldn't, and I don't think the police liked that. From their point of view, I'd tricked CPS, I was living without proper adult supervision, I'd lied about my age, and I'd stolen money from my trust fund. On top of that, I wasn't crying over the disappearance of a close friend, and I'd been thrown out of my last school for fighting. You could just see them trying to make a case that I was some sort of violent wacko who killed Raye in a fit of temper and was now scaring the others into not talking.

Eventually, though, they backed off. We couldn't tell them about the Sailor Scouts and the Negaverse, and they couldn't find any actual evidence that Raye was dead, much less that we'd killed her. So they stopped coming around to question us. Not that this meant that it was over.


	7. Chapter 7

7.

With all this going on, three days went by before I could finally sneak back to the construction site.

I wasn't really thinking clearly by this point. All the questions and accusations were running together in my mind, and people just wouldn't leave me alone. On top of this, my arm hurt just enough to make sleeping difficult-or maybe that was because CPS had stuck me with a lot of other girls in some sort of dormitory. Just as I'd start dozing off, I'd hear crying, or a fight would start, or someone would wake up screaming from a nightmare, and then I'd be wide awake trying to ignore them and my arm and not having any luck. At least Serena and Amy got to sleep in their own beds. I tried not to feel too sorry for myself, but even Mina, who'd just woken up, had her parents and Artemis waiting for her.

Gods, I missed my mom and dad . . .

I wouldn't have gotten to the construction site at all if I hadn't been able to transform to Sailor Jupiter. I guess a broken arm must be a major injury, because the cast stayed even after I transformed. So much for a secret identity-even the disguise magic was going to have trouble hiding this thing. At least it didn't hurt after the transformation.

It wasn't a problem finding my way around the place this time. The police had set up so much security lighting that I almost needed sunglasses. It made the whole place seem different. Normal. Harmless. Not the sort of place where you found gateways to other worlds and fought off demonic creatures. Or where your friends died and any ideas you had that being a Sailor Scout was fun died a bit too.

_Raye is dead._

I'd been telling myself this for three days. It wouldn't sink in. I could say the words all I wanted to, but they didn't mean anything. The police were right: there was something wrong with me. Normal people feel something when a friend dies, don't they? I couldn't feel anything. So here I was, back at the construction site at two in the morning, trying to convince myself that the nightmare had actually happened. And the one thing I figured that would do the trick was finding Raye's bow. Maybe if I actually saw it, I could get it through my head that she wasn't coming back.

_"Look, if you're so obsessed about this bow, we'll come back tomorrow in the daytime and rescue it."_

Not a promise, not really. I hadn't been serious when I'd said that. I'd just wanted her to stop yelling at me about how I'd screwed up when she was the one who'd asked me to help her in the first place. I mean, I could have told the others and let Serena tease her, even if it would have majorly embarrassed her.

Dammit, it wouldn't have killed her to just say 'thank you.'

Great choice of words there. And even if I couldn't feel anything about her being dead, I did manage to feel guilty for being mad at her. It wasn't really fair, getting angry at someone who wasn't around to defend herself anymore.

_If it wasn't a promise, why are you out here on a cold night with a broken arm, running the risk that you're going to trip an alarm or get videotaped?_

I had to see the bow. No, more than that: I wanted to get it off the fence properly this time. Leaving it there to weather away felt wrong. If Raye wanted a perfect uniform, then the least I could do was make sure that the only part of it I could find wasn't going to end up in a hundred birds' nests next spring. And with this much light, I could probably work it free even if I was wearing gloves and had a cast on.

Only the bow wasn't there.

I must have stared at the fence for a full minute, trying to figure out what had happened, and totally forgetting about not being seen. I knew I had the right area of the fence. There was still bright yellow tape marking off the area. The police must have had a field day with all the footprints in the area, none of which could have been mistaken for construction workers. And then of course there were a few weird burn marks left where Mina had missed a target.

Oh, I really did need to get some sleep. Of course the bow was gone-any idiot would have known that it would be the first thing the police would take as evidence. Raye's pride and joy was probably locked away in some dingy little evidence room at the nearest police station, which meant that it might as well have been on the other side of the universe, because I was **not** going to attack innocent people for the sake of that stupid bow.

If it wasn't a promise, why did I feel like I'd failed her?

I leaned over the yellow tape, trying to get a better look at where the bow used to be. Maybe there'd be a red thread or something still on the fence-it **had** been pretty well stuck. But there was nothing. The police had been careful. It was like the bow had van-

_No._

The bow really would have vanished if Raye had transformed back. Only there was no reason for her to do that in the middle of a fight. But what would have happened to it when she-

I still didn't cry. Couldn't. But something twisted my insides into a knot, and I doubled over like I had been hit in the stomach, and dropped to my knees by the fence. I started rocking back and forth while this little voice in my head kept saying that I wasn't ever going to see Raye Hino again, never break up another fight between her and Serena, never hear her complain about her grandfather again, or watch her boss Chad around . . .

I don't know how long I was out there, but when I finally started paying attention to things around me again, I was so cold I couldn't feel my hands or feet. I'd been in worse weather before in this outfit and hadn't had a problem, but I was in pretty bad shape tonight and maybe I had to be healthy for the magic or whatever it was to work right. At least I lucked out in one way: I guess there wasn't a working security camera at the construction site. The last thing any of us needed was a tape of Sailor Jupiter on national TV freaking out at the same place Raye had disappeared.

I collapsed back in bed about two hours before I had to get up and deal with CPS and the police again. At least the lack of sleep was going to keep me from hearing half of what they were actually saying to me.


	8. Chapter 8

8.

It was almost a week before we all managed to get together again. All of us except Mina, of course, who'd only just been sent home. They still hadn't let us visit her, although Mina's parents promised to give her our messages. I didn't understand why we couldn't see her if she was well enough to go home. Then I decided the police wanted to question her without us influencing her.

We desperately needed to talk privately, but worried families and suspicious authorities had made it impossible. We finally resorted to sneaking out in the middle of the night and meeting in a park. We'd transformed, but I was still afraid that someone would follow us and put it all together. But it was worth running the risk if it gave us the chance to talk freely. I'm not a good liar, and we'd lied so much over the past few days that it was making me sick. How many times can you say that you were poking around a dangerous construction site just for fun when everyone knows it's a lie?

We'd mumbled greetings to each other, but then the conversation had died. Mina's absence was obvious, but expected. Raye's . . . I shivered. Was every Sailor Scout meeting we had from now on going to hurt like this?

I risked a glance at the others. Serena was intently tracing lines in the dirt with a stick. Amy had drawn her knees up under her chin. Wrapping her arms around them, she stared off into space. Luna was . . . looking at me. I jerked my eyes away, then flushed.

"Girls . . . " Luna sighed. Then she resumed. "You're going to have to talk-"

A twig snapped to my left. We froze. I'd been right to be paranoid. Someone **had** followed us. If they'd seen one of us transform . . .

Mina staggered into our midst, with Artemis trailing close behind. Amy and I hastily made room for her as she dropped down between us, swaying slightly.

"What are you doing here, Mina?" Serena spluttered. "You can barely walk! What are you doing out of bed?"

"I had to come," Mina protested. She ran delicate fingers over the huge bandage on her temple and winced. "Talk to me. What **happened?"**

"I cannot believe you let her come." Luna ignored Mina and glared at Artemis. "You're supposed to be taking care of her!"

"Don't get mad at him," Mina begged as Artemis started to stammer out an excuse. "I made him tell me about the meeting. Anyway, now that I'm here, wouldn't I get more rest sitting here listening to you instead of trying to make it back home again?"

Well, she had a point. But since none of us could think of anything to say, Mina got to listen to silence. She didn't stand for it.

"One of you, please, fill me in." We all looked at each other awkwardly. I knew she didn't remember anything, but it felt so weird to have to tell her about stuff that she'd lived through.

"Luna, can't you bring back her memories? You know, the Luna Mind Meld, like what you did after we killed Queen Beryl?" Serena gave Luna a hopeful look. Mina's expression was closer to desperate.

"I'm sorry, Mina," Luna said gently. "But the Luna Mind Meld would only work if magic had taken your memories. This was a physical injury. I can't do anything about it."

Mina closed her eyes briefly.

"Then quit stalling and talk to me! You want to know what I remember? Zilch. Look, one minute, I'm shoving books into my bag, wondering when I'm going to find time to get my homework done before we get together and go into the Negaverse. The next minute, I'm in the hospital with my parents leaning over me crying with joy because I'm alive. I've lost two days of my life. Later they tell me that my friend Raye has mysteriously vanished and could I talk to the police about it? And when Artemis finally manages to sneak in and tell me what really happened, he tells me that Raye is **dead!** " Her breathing was becoming harsher. "Not knowing is **killing** me. I can't stay out all night begging you to tell me what happened. I feel really sick. I want to go home. So please, just tell me how it went so majorly wrong!"

So we told her.

It was kind of a confused story. We more or less agreed on everything up to the point that Mina went back to Earth through the Portal. But none of us could tell her exactly why she'd decided to take off first, or what had happened in the minute or two before I'd sent Serena through. Then we had two stories to tell, one from each side of the Portal, then more as we got closer to the moment of Raye's death, when everyone had been acting on her own. None of us had seen what had hit her, so we couldn't even tell her **why** she couldn't remember any of this.

Telling her about the minute we realized that Raye had been left behind was the worst. Amy, who'd been pretty withdrawn for most of the night, just folded in on herself and refused to speak. Luna pressed close to her, while Serena draped an arm around her shoulders and hugged her. I ended up being the one who told Mina what had happened.

She started crying. Of course. She wasn't even there and it touched her that deeply. I remembered the whole damn nightmare firsthand, and I still couldn't react to it.

And then there was my little speech to Amy to finish the night's events off with. I was surprised Mina could hear me at all. My throat was so tight with self-loathing that I was whispering more than talking.

Amy just sat there and wouldn't look up. I couldn't bear to look at her either. One big happy united team.


	9. Chapter 9

9.

Serena, Amy, and I returned to school the following week. I'm usually not all that fond of school, but by now I was desperate for life to get back to normal, and school is about as normal as it gets.

It was kind of weird walking into class. The whole room went silent when people saw me. I slid into my seat just as the bell rang, but I could feel them staring at me.

During a break, I approached Jenny Tanaka. Jenny and I weren't good friends or anything, but we'd had a few conversations. The main point was that she got pretty good grades, and I needed to borrow someone's notes and find out just how far behind I was in everything.

"Hey, Jenny!"

She looked at me a bit warily. "Yeah?"

"Can you catch me up on what's going on?"

She didn't say anything at first. Her eyes widened and she looked at her friends, but they didn't answer either.

"I . . . I haven't been taking . . . I mean . . . that is . . . um, my notes aren't very good. You should probably borrow someone else's." She looked nervous.

I blinked. She was even worse at lying than I was.

"Uh . . . no problem. Thanks anyway." I hadn't expected this.

"Sorry," she babbled. "Maybe someone else can help you. Or the teacher." Who did she think was going to help? The whole class had shut up and was watching us. I didn't see anyone rushing forward to offer their notes.

I looked around. Everyone hastily turned back to their conversations, pretending that nothing had happened. The only person who met my eyes was Nancy Yamada. She smiled slightly.

I took a deep breath. Nancy and I hated each other, and had from my first day at Crossroads. She was just like most of the girls at my old school, and I hadn't gotten along with them either. She seemed to think that everyone should be grateful for her very presence in their drab little lives. I thought she was a stuck-up snob, and I'd told her so on my second day at Crossroads. If she was smiling now, I was in trouble.

"Lita? Do you need help?" She managed to make it sound as if I were too stupid to know how to ask people for something without screwing up. Like it was my fault Jenny wouldn't share her notes?

Everyone else was carefully ignoring us. I could see where this was going. No one was going to lend me their notes except Nancy, and she was going to make me crawl for them.

_Just ask her for the rotten notes. Just ask her and get it over with! If you don't, you'll have to ask the teacher for help. Then he'll wonder why you couldn't borrow them, and you'll have to tell him about this._

The idea of being sent off to confess all to the school guidance counselor didn't bear thinking. Crossroads would probably rat on me to CPS. So, cheeks burning, I asked.

Of course, she gave me her notes. Very graciously, too. I almost threw the nearest chair at her.

By lunch, I never wanted to see Crossroads Junior High School again. CPS hadn't even trusted me to pack my own lunch, and what they'd sent me with wasn't appetizing. But the way I was feeling, I wouldn't have wanted to eat the finest gourmet foods.

"Hey, Lita!" Serena. I could have kissed her. She plopped down next to me. "Aren't you going to eat that?" Normality, at last!

"Here, you have it." I shoved the bag at her.

"You're not going to eat **anything?** Are you all right? Is your arm hurting?" She gave me a worried look.

I wanted to tell her everything, but at the same time, I didn't want to upset her. So I didn't say anything. Of course that never works with Serena, but before she could ask any more, Amy and Molly came over. Amy looked slightly overwhelmed, but this was an improvement over what she'd looked like for the past week, so I wasn't going to complain. Molly seemed to be in a bad mood. Maybe she'd done badly on a test or something.

"So what's wrong?" Serena persisted.

I might have told her if we were alone. But what I was going through was nothing compared to what Amy was probably feeling, so it seemed . . . I don't know . . . stupid to talk about it in front of her. And I didn't know Molly very well, which made it hard to talk about personal stuff with her around. So I just muttered "Nothing" and hoped Serena would get the hint. Serena? Ha.

"Oh, come on, Lita. Tell us."

"Get a clue, Serena. What do you **think** is wrong?" I was surprised to hear Molly join in. I was even more surprised when she asked me, "Are all your friends pretending you're dead, too?"

_What?_

I looked back and forth between them. Molly was definitely angry. Serena's bubbly mood had evaporated. "Molly, I don't want to talk about it," she hissed.

"Well, **I** do," I snapped. "What are you talking about, Molly?"

"No one will talk to her!" Molly said heatedly. "They just pretend they're busy or they have to go somewhere or something."

Serena glared at her. "Will you shut up? I didn't want to tell them! Besides, it's noth-" She broke off as she made the connection, and looked at me.

I nodded.

"But I don't get it," Molly protested. "So the police talked to you for a while. That's no reason to treat you like this!"

The thought occurred to all of us at once. "Amy?"

From the way she was picking at her food, I'd say her appetite was about as strong as mine. She murmured, "I never talked to the other students all that much before. I hadn't noticed much difference."

She was lying. I wasn't sure how I knew-maybe because she was looking at her food instead of us-but something had happened this morning. I could make a guess about what. Nancy's best friend was in Amy's class. But Amy wasn't talking, and I didn't dare call her on it, not after yelling at her about Raye.

We'd arranged to get together with Mina after school. By the end of the day, I think we were all desperate to see a friendly face.

"My day? Just fine, I guess. Everyone kept asking me about the bandage of course, but I knew that was going to happen. It's getting me lots of sympathy. Though I think it throws everyone when I tell them I can't remember hitting my head. They get this sort of amazed look on their faces. How was life at

Crossroads?" When we told her (or, in Amy's case, didn't tell her), she did a pretty good job herself of looking amazed. "But aren't some of them supposed to be your friends? And they still treated you like that?"

"Would you like to come to our school and explain that to them?" I growled. I was still smarting from having to ask Nancy for a favor. At least my appetite was coming back, but even treating myself to an extra piece of pie wasn't making me feel all that much better. Eating left-handed was a pain.

"Maybe it's just the shock," Mina offered. "How can everyone just suddenly forget that you're nice people?"

I wasn't feeling very forgiving. "You know what gets me? They didn't even know Raye. I could maybe understand it if we all went to the same school or something, but no one at Crossroads was friends with her except us, and they're still acting like we killed one of them."

There was a small clattering noise across the table from me as Amy pushed her chair back. "I really should be home studying. I've gotten behind in everything, and it'll take me a while to catch up. Good-bye." And she was out the door before any of us could react.

Mina looked from me to Serena, a puzzled expression on her face. "Do either of you know what that was about?"

"Um, no, not really," Serena mumbled. Lying of course.

It hit me right then, and I flushed. I'd said the 'k' word. Stupid! When was I going to learn to **think** before opening my mouth?

"Lita? Are you feeling all right?" Mina was still confused, but she was starting to sound annoyed as well. "Will one of you please tell me what's going on?"

"You explain," I ordered Serena. "I've got to find Amy!"

"Lita, wait!" Serena yelped, but I ignored her and dashed out the door after Amy.

Running with my arm in a cast felt weird, like I was off-balance somehow. Still, my legs are a lot longer than Amy's, so it wasn't all that hard to catch up with her. Of course, the minute I caught up to her, I couldn't figure out how to say what I had to.

"Did I forget something back there? You could have given it to me at school tomorrow."

Tomorrow. Oh joy. We were going to get to go through this all over again tomorrow. I'd managed to not think about that until now.

"I'm sorry."

She kept walking.

"Amy?"

"I heard you." She showed no signs of slowing down.

Frustrated, I looked around. Yes! A low wall was only a few feet ahead.

"Come on," I said, pointing at the wall. "Sit down for a moment, will you? I'm getting tired of talking to the back of your head."

"I told you, I have to go home."

"Amy, **sit down.** " She sat, but she didn't look very happy about it.

"I'm sorry," I said again. It sounded really lame. Amy just stared out across the road, picking at something on her bookbag. When she didn't say anything, I made myself go on. "It wasn't your fault. I know you didn't deliberately leave her there." Still no answer. "You didn't kill her, Amy! I

shouldn't have made it sound like you did. I say things without thinking-you **know** I do!" She stopped picking at her bookbag. "Amy, would you please say something?"

"It's all right." Amy's voice was flat. "I wish you'd stop apologizing. I know you didn't mean it."

"No, it's not-"

"Look, I need to get home. My mother gets nervous now if I stay out too late." She stood up. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine." She turned the corner and disappeared, leaving me sitting speechless on the wall.

About a minute or so later, Serena appeared, panting. "What happened? Did you find her?"

"Where's Mina? You didn't just dump her at the restaurant, did you?"

"She'll catch up. She didn't look up to running, but I was afraid I'd never find you if I walked. Where's Amy?"

I pointed towards the corner. "Going home."

Serena went from looking exhausted to looking torn. She glanced at me, turned towards the corner, looked back at me, and bit her lip.

"Go on," I sighed. "I'll wait here for Mina." Maybe Amy'd talk to Serena, even if she wouldn't talk to me. Serena gave me a guilty half-smile, took a deep breath, and launched herself around the corner, yelling for Amy to slow down.

I waited, trying to keep the last few minutes from going around and around in my head, and not having a lot of luck. After a bit, Mina showed up. She was carrying two bookbags and looked more worn out than Serena.

"I don't believe it. Serena's making you pick up after her?"

"What was I supposed to do-leave her stuff in the restaurant? She took off before I could stop her." She dropped both bags on the wall and sank down next to me. "Where are they, anyway?"

"Headed for Amy's, last I saw."

She raised an eyebrow. "You . . . weren't invited?"

"I don't think Amy wants to talk to me right now." _Or ever again._ Serena ran after her.

"Oh." She hesitated. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"What's there to talk about? I said I was sorry. I think this is the third time I've apologized since . . . since **it** happened. She says it's all right, but she says it in this tone of voice so you know she's lying. But she won't get angry or yell at me or anything, and it just . . it just feels wrong!"

"You'd rather have a screaming match with her? I can't even imagine her getting that angry."

"At least if she yelled at me, I'd know she was mad. I **said** I was sorry. If everything's all right, then she shouldn't be acting like this. If it isn't all right, then why won't she say so?"

"Do you mean it?"

I stared at her blankly.

"When you apologize. Do you mean it? Do you really think it wasn't her fault?"

"Do I mean-what kind of question is *that?* Of course, I mean it!"

"Are you sure? Look, the way all of you talk about what happened, you pretty well put all the blame for Raye's death on Amy. So maybe she thinks you meant it then, and you're just trying to be nice about it now because Serena jumped down your throat when you yelled at her."

I could feel my face turning red. I really, **really** felt rotten about what I'd said back at the construction site. But I couldn't stop thinking things like _if you'd looked up from your computer just once, you'd have known that was a youma, not Raye! How could you be so blind? How could you just_ _leave her there?!_

"Do you mean it?" Mina pressed.

"No," I whispered. "Yes. I don't know!" I couldn't believe I could be so mean to Amy. When I'd first said all those things to her, I was hurt, tired, scared-I guess I had some excuses for losing control, even though I shouldn't have. But I didn't have those excuses now, so why couldn't I stop thinking these things about her? She was my friend!

"Lita . . . " Mina shook her head slowly. "Lita, if I could figure it out, Amy's going to have known it all along. She's **looking** to see if you're really apologizing or not."

"Then why does she keep saying it's all right? If she thinks I'm lying, why doesn't she say so?" Somehow I had the idea that if she'd just get mad at me, it'd make us even somehow.

"Maybe she figures you were right the first time. If she thinks it really is her fault that Rate died, then . . . " She sighed.

"Now what?" I said finally. "You're saying she won't accept any apology I make, right? Am I just supposed to pretend that everything's all right anyway? It's not! She's barely speaking to me!"

Mina shrugged. "I don't know. Give her some time, maybe? And she might talk to Serena. Anyway, we've been here for a while, and Serena hasn't come back yet, so that's a good sign, right?"

I tried to think positively about it. Serena was Amy's best friend in the Sailor Scouts. I didn't know Amy nearly as well, so maybe that was why things were so awkward between us. Serena'd make it better somehow. It'd be all right. I hoped.

"Do me a favor?"

"Huh?" I jerked my head up, startled. I'd gotten so focused on wondering how this was all going to work out that I'd almost forgotten Mina was there.

"Sure. Um, what?"

"Earth to Lita, Earth to Lita!" She smiled slightly. "I'm sorry, but I'm starting to crash." She looked at me hopefully. "Could you . . . um . . . pick up after Serena?"

"You mean, drop her books off at her house?" I groaned. "Yeah, no problem. Though she'd deserve it if we just left them here."

"Suit yourself." Mina grinned. "But I'm not the one who's going to have to listen to her wailing all through lunch tomorrow about her teacher bawling her out in front of the whole class for having lost her books."

"Thanks for reminding me," I said sourly. "I'll run them by there right now. They'll probably get home before she does."

"Thanks." Mina sounded relieved. I looked at her more closely. She looked sort of white and sick.

"Are you all right?"

"Oh yeah-I just need to get some sleep. Everyone said this might take a while to recover from. You know, someday, when Amy's a doctor, I want her to tell me why it's taking this long to get better from getting a bonk on the head, while I felt just fine after coming back from the dead. It doesn't seem quite fair, somehow."

I glared at my cast. "Tell me about it. I was never meant to be left-handed!"

Mina stood up. "Hey, good luck tomorrow! It's got to be just a temporary thing, I bet. They've just got to remember you're nice people!"

I didn't think it was going to work out that easily, but why spoil her mood?

"See'ya!" I waved as she headed back the way she'd come, then tried to pick up both my bag and Serena's. Silly me. Why did I say I'd do this, when I didn't have two free hands? People walking by turned and stared as I suddenly yelled at the sky, "Serena! You owe me big time for this!"


	10. Chapter 10

10.

Mina was right, in a way. After a while, people did start remembering that they'd liked Serena. Of course, she had a few advantages. She'd been at Crossroads a lot longer than either me or Amy, so people knew her better. On top of that, Molly stuck by her, and where Molly went, Melvin followed. And I guess it's really hard for people to see a ditz as a cold-blooded murderer. So when they figured out that she wasn't hurting either Molly or Melvin, they started talking to her again, and after a while I don't think many people remembered she had anything at all to do with Raye's disappearance.

Amy hid. Well, I called it "hiding." She called it "studying." Yeah, right. Like she had to spend every lunch period in the library? And somehow she just had to go straight home after school every day and couldn't ever go to a movie or the mall? After a bit, I started getting really worried about her. I mean, Nancy had decided I was fair game, but she only said things to me every now and then, and I didn't worry about running into her when we weren't at school. What was going on with Amy that she wanted to avoid everyone, even us? Like ditzes, geniuses don't seem like the sort of people who kill their friends, so I didn't think the other kids hated her or anything.

My reputation was trashed. Even though I'd only told Serena the reason I'd transferred to Crossroads, everyone knew it was because I'd been expelled from my old school for fighting. Even though Raye hadn't gone to Crossroads, somehow everyone knew that we were the last people to see her alive. And then everyone learned that the police had questioned us a lot. So all those things got put together and it hit me the worst. It might have been really cool if I was going to help the police catch a spy or something, but no one wants to be seen talking to someone who might have killed a girl who was just like them. It was too creepy.

As far as most of the kids were concerned, my being taken in by CPS was the same as being convicted of murder. Most kids didn't talk to me at all. When they did, they were nervous, just like Jenny had been when I asked for her notes. It was like my first day at Crossroads, except that now, not even seeing me with Serena was convincing anyone that I wasn't going to hurt them. The teachers weren't much help either. Lots of times I'd see some of them talking to each other when they didn't know I was nearby. And then they'd shut up when they saw me and just stare, or maybe nod if I smiled at them.

For a while, I thought about transferring to still yet another school. But what good would it have done? Transferring to Crossroads hadn't kept my reputation from following me from my old school. Besides, as bad as Crossroads was, I had more friends there than I would have had at any other school. But most of all, I didn't want to admit to anyone that this could defeat me. I was Sailor Jupiter. I'd faced down monsters from other dimensions determined to destroy the Earth. I'd even died. So what was a little gossip compared to all that?

But it hurt.


	11. Chapter 11

11

Slowly I gave up on things ever going back to the way they were before Raye died. I mean, I knew being a Sailor Scout was never going to be the same, but I guess I'd been hoping that even if I had to deal with CPS for the next four years, that the rest of my life would have been "normal." Then I realized that there wasn't much of my life that didn't involve the Sailor Scouts.

Soon after everything fell apart, so much started going on in my life that I didn't pay attention to anyone else much for a while. CPS had gone all out to get me into a new foster home as fast as possible. I think they were nervous about my leading the other kids astray. They didn't need to worry. I wasn't getting along with them any better than I had with the kids from my old school. Anyway, I ended up living with Mr. and Mrs. Kitamura. I knew the Kitamuras meant well, and they were as much better than CPS as CPS was better than my first foster parents, but it wasn't home, and I hated it. I'd gotten used to living by myself, and now suddenly I had a curfew and I had to tell them where I was when I wasn't home, ask permission to go places, go to bed by a certain hour, and eat the kinds of foods they liked. They wanted to meet all my friends (Right. Like I was going to introduce Luna and Artemis to them?). They even went through my wardrobe once-I guess to make sure I wasn't dressing weird or something. I felt like I was suffocating, but I didn't dare get into any major arguments with them. What if they decided to dump me back at CPS? If a second foster home didn't work out, I'd probably wind up in an orphanage or something, and that'd be even worse, right? At least all the adults decided to keep me at Crossroads to "minimize the trauma" or something like that. That's probably the only reason I didn't get expelled.

When I transferred to Crossroads, I'd promised myself that I'd never get in another fight. Since I was a runaway, I couldn't afford to have people calling my foster parents to talk about my disciplinary problems. But I'd met Serena and Amy and Raye, and learned I was Sailor Jupiter, and suddenly all those things I'd gotten in fights about at my school just didn't matter anymore. Nancy Yamada was a pest, but hey, inhuman monsters were trying to kill me, so why worry about her? She wasn't important enough to bother with.

Now things were different. Except for Serena and Molly (and Amy . . . I guess), I didn't have a single friend at school, but I also didn't have any youma to distract me, so it was a lot harder to ignore Nancy. And she always knew just what to say that would hurt the most, and I couldn't think of anything brilliant to say back until hours later, and I wasn't going to go whining to the teachers. It was just like my old school all over again. So one day, Nancy said something about how I should stick to wearing "ugly" brown and white uniforms because no one at Crossroads wanted me to be mistaken for one of them. It was a pretty gentle comment for Nancy, but I'd just had a talk with the teacher about how bad my grades were getting, and I kinda lost it.

Eventually, someone pulled me off of her. I hadn't broken anything, but sometime during the fight, I must have caught her in the nose, because there was blood everywhere. She was crying and the tears and blood made her face an awful mess. I didn't feel guilty for hurting her-she looked a lot worse off than she actually was-but it's not like I magically felt better just because I finally creamed her. I got suspended, and the Kitamuras were horrified. I wondered if this'd make them return me to CPS, which had me more scared than anything Crossroads could do, but they were being all understanding. It made me feel even worse for some reason.

Black eye, bruises, and all, Nancy sailed back into school two days later, and everyone just fell over themselves wanting to talk to her and feel sorry for her. She was loving every minute of it. Any time she saw me, she'd look scared, and all her new friends would walk up next to her and glare at me until I left.

I did run into her once when no one else was around. She didn't look scared of me at all. I nearly turned around and left, but I didn't want her to think I'd given up. So I walked past her instead, trying to ignore her. I didn't need trouble with anyone right then.

"Bitch." She smiled, and it was that same little superior smile she'd had right after I'd asked Jenny for her notes. "Are you really so stupid that you don't get it? We don't want you here. Aren't you supposed to be in jail or a mental hospital or something? That's where they put crazy people like you who kill their friends and beat up on their classmates!"

What was I supposed to say to that? I could feel my fists clenching, but I didn't dare hit her again or they'd probably arrest me or something. And I kept telling myself that while I forced myself to go past her without even looking at her. But she'd won that round and we both knew it.

We only had one actual fight, but other kids could be just as mean as she was. Oh, the teachers knew the other students were saying really nasty things to me, but their idea of help was to tell me to just ignore the comments and the other kids would get bored. How I was supposed to ignore comments I couldn't even think about later without feeling dirty, they didn't tell me. So it was a lot easier just to make the other kids shut up. Except that the more fights I won, the more everyone hated me.


	12. Chapter 12

12

Spring came, and with it came what would have been Raye's fifteenth birthday.

Birthdays were turning out to be kind of uncomfortable. My birthday had been four months ago, and I'd been looking forward to it until everything came crashing down around us. I was still being held by CPS, and they made me spend the day being shuffled from one official to another while having to listen to lectures on why I was wrong to have run away from the Todas and how dangerous it was for a young girl to be living alone. They didn't get it. Being a Sailor Scout was dangerous. Living alone was just exhausting.

If my birthday had been grim, Raye's promised to be a disaster. I hadn't been looking forward to April this year. I'd marked all of our birthdays on my calendar, and when I'd come to April, I couldn't figure out what to do. Should I have marked Raye's birthday in, even though we weren't going to be celebrating it? But if I left her out, I felt like I was pretending that we'd never been friends, that she'd never lived. So I'd finally decided to write it in. Ever since I'd flipped the page to April, I couldn't stop looking at the 17th every time I saw the calendar.

April 17 itself was a beautiful day. I lay in bed and tried to figure out how I was going to get out of going to school. I hated feeling like I was letting the other kids scare me off, but to spend today of all days dealing with Nancy and her friends . . . ? I mean, I knew I'd haul off and punch out some kid before the day was through.

"Lita?" Mrs. Kitamura knocked gently and came in. "Are you awake? You're going to be late if you don't get up soon."

"I don't feel all that great," I mumbled.

She frowned and leaned over, brushing the back of her hand against my face. "You don't feel like you have a fever. And the way you cook, I doubt it was something you ate." She looked pretty skeptical. I was just about to try to convince her I had cramps when she added, "Is it because it's your friend's birthday?"

"Huh? How'd you know-?" So much for pretending I was sick.

She nodded towards my calendar. "It's not much of a secret. She's fifteen today, isn't she?"

Raye wasn't ever going to be fifteen.

I nodded.

"And you don't want to go to school today."

"I . . . it's just . . . We were supposed to be celebrating it, and she's-" Dead. "We don't know where she is."

Mrs. Kitamura didn't say anything. I slowly sat up, trying to remember where I'd left my last clean uniform. If pretending to be sick didn't work, there was always skipping school-though I hardly needed more time in detention.

"All right."

I blinked. Did she really say-?

"Just this once, understand?"

"Uh-huh! I mean . . . yes."

"And this doesn't mean you can laze around in bed all day," she continued briskly. "After breakfast, I want you to start fixing those torn uniforms of yours before you run out of school clothes entirely." She sighed. "You know, if you wouldn't get in so many fights, you'd look less like a patchwork girl." She looked at me expectantly. "Well, come on, then. Breakfast is getting cold." And then she raised an eyebrow. "Or you can go to school, if you'd prefer."

"Um, Mrs. Kitamura?"

"Yes, Lita?"

"Thanks," I murmured.

"Don't thank me quite yet, young lady," she said crisply, starting down the stairs. "You're not on vacation today. You may wish by tonight that you'd gone to school after all!"

It didn't actually take me all that long to fix the uniforms. I like the cooking sections of home ec better than the sewing ones, but I'm not bad at sewing-and I was getting a lot of practice lately repairing things. Besides, she'd have made me mend the uniforms at some point anyway. I think she could have thought of a lot of other things to make me do, but she let me go at about the time I would have normally been getting out of school.

I decided to try to find the others. We hadn't made any plans for the day-we hadn't even talked about it-but nice as Mrs. Kitamura was being, I wanted to be around people who knew all about Raye. I couldn't keep pretending I believed Mrs. Kitamura when she acted like they'd find Raye any day now.

Finding Serena and Luna wasn't that hard. I knew Serena's usual way home from school, and I'd guessed right about her not going to the video game center. I knew I wasn't in a mood to play video games today.

"Weren't you supposed to be out sick today?" Luna asked in a disapproving tone. "You and Amy both, as I understand."

Amy didn't go to school either? When your mother's a doctor, how do you fake being sick?

"I . . . " I shrugged. "Going to school today wouldn't have been a good idea, Luna."

"Lucky you," Serena sighed. "I should have tried that. But my mother wouldn't have believed me."

"Could you blame her?" Luna wondered. "You never want to go to school."

I snorted. "Oh, Mrs. Kitamura didn't believe me for a moment. She just decided to be nice. Was it really bad?"

"School? No, not really. I mean, it wasn't any different than usual. I just didn't . . . you know . . . " Her voice trailed off.

"Yeah." We walked along without talking for a while. I don't think we were planning to go anywhere in particular-it just felt better than being cooped up inside. So I was surprised to look up and realize that we were at the foot of the stairs leading up to Cherry Hill Temple. I froze, and Serena bumped into me. We slowly looked up the stairs, and then stared at each other.

"Do you want to go up?" Serena asked softly.

"No."

"Me neither." But neither of us budged. Draped over Serena's shoulder, Luna just watched us. Behind us, a bus rumbled to a stop, and then we were suddenly surrounded by a group of older girls, talking and laughing. I moved to one side to let them get by. When I looked around again, Serena had started up the stairs, taking Luna with her.

I'd meant it when I'd said I didn't want to go, but I followed them anyway.

My legs ached by the time we got to the top, and Serena had to catch her breath. When we'd been coming up here regularly for Scout meetings, it'd kept us in better shape.

It was hard at first to really figure out what had changed. Everything looked the same-it wasn't like the buildings were falling apart or anything like that-but it didn't feel very welcoming. Which maybe explained why the place felt so deserted. Usually there'd be someone there to buy a charm or offer a prayer or whatever, but now there wasn't even anyone behind the counter selling stuff.

Serena looked around for a moment, still not saying anything. Then she moved out into the yard, keeping away from the main buildings. Not knowing what else to do, I followed.

"Are you all right?" I whispered. I hadn't heard anything except traffic noise from the bottom of the hill, but it felt like we were trespassing. Serena nodded, but wouldn't meet my eyes. She started playing with her brooch, running a finger around and around the rim. Luna wriggled off her shoulders and jumped down to the ground.

I wished I hadn't followed Serena up here. I was feeling more and more uncomfortable. Maybe she needed some time alone, but I didn't want to ask her and keep bothering her with questions, and it wouldn't be right to just leave her.

Was there any living creature up here besides the three of us? This was getting creepier by the second. I looked around, hoping to at least catch a glimpse of Raye's crows. No luck. Maybe they'd abandoned the shrine when she didn't come back?

"I tried to save her." Serena spoke at normal volume, nearly scaring me to death.

"What? How?" And when? None of us had known Raye needed help until it was too late.

Her voice was distant. "The Silver Crystal." She popped open the brooch. The Imperium Silver Crystal flashed in the sunlight as she turned the brooch around, staring at it. "It didn't work . . . but you've probably figured that out already."

All right, I wasn't an expert on how to use the Silver Crystal. But judging from what happened when Queen Serenity used it for the last time, it sounded like it worked on the principle of 'a life for a life.' Which meant-

"You did what?"

"Serena!" Luna sounded horrified.

"Look, okay, maybe it wasn't the smartest thing to do," Serena said defensively. "But I had to try something!"

"Well, not that! And you didn't even tell us?!"

"So you could tell me not to do it?" She snapped the brooch closed and turned away, staring out over the yard, arms folded across her chest.

"Yes!" The minute I said it, I realized how dumb it sounded. "Serena, I wanted to help her too, but-"

"I should have been able to do something," she muttered. "The Crystal should have worked. I asked it to save her, to bring her back to life, and nothing happened!"

"Don't . . . do . . . that . . . again," Luna managed finally. "Serena, you are the Moon Princess. You have responsibilities-"

"Didn't I have a responsibility to Raye? To everyone? I could have told Amy we'd just fight the youma that made it to Earth. Maybe we could have gotten them once they came out of the Portal or something-I don't know! But if we hadn't gone in, she wouldn't have died, Luna!"

"You don't know that. I don't wish to sound cruel, but she might very well have died fighting a youma in Tokyo. You cannot blame yourself for her death."

"I should have been able to do something," Serena repeated defiantly. She whirled and glared at us. "What's the point of being the Moon Princess, of being Sailor Moon, if I can't even help my friends?" She took a deep, shaky breath. "What responsibilities, Luna? Protecting the Crystal? Maybe it's the most important thing in the universe, or whatever, but it's kind of hard to believe that right now!" Her hand clenched around the brooch, and she looked ready to yank it off her uniform. "And now I guess all it's good for is turning me into Sailor Moon-and that's not worth dying for. At least if I'd been able to bring Raye back, it'd have done something important!"

"Yeah, and then you'd be dead!" I burst out. "Weren't you thinking about that part? What-were you just gonna let your mom walk into your room and find your dead body lying on the bed or something?" Serena's eyes widened, and her face drained. I bet she hadn't thought this through at all. You don't try something like this if you know how it feels to have your family die.

Serena's hand slipped off the brooch and she looked down at the ground. After a moment, she mumbled, "I was being really stupid, huh?"

"No, you weren't. Wanting to help isn't stupid. I-"

"What the hell are you doing here?"

I nearly had a heart attack. Serena gasped and I spun around, stepping on Luna's tail. She let out a squawk, startling us even more.

Where did he come from? How long has he been-ack! Did he hear Serena say she was Sailor Moon?

"Chad?"

I don't know why I asked. I knew perfectly well what Chad looked like. But seeing him was like seeing Cherry Hill Temple: they looked the same on the outside, but they'd changed.

"Um, hi, Chad," Serena babbled nervously. "Where did you come from? We didn't see anyone, but, I mean, it is a shrine, so I thought it'd be all right if we came up here, and-"

"It isn't."

Serena's mouth dropped open in mid-babble.

"You don't have to be so nasty about it," I said when I finally found my voice again. "If you don't want people up here, you should put a sign down at the bottom of the stairs or something."

"What's wrong? Why are you mad?"

"Oh, don't bother, Serena. He doesn't want us here."

"It's been five months." Chad's voice was almost a growl. "You pick today of all days to show up for the first time since . . . " He whipped an arm towards the stairs. "Look, just get out!"

"We just . . . when we realized we were in the neighborhood, I just had to see the temple again. I didn't think we were doing anything wrong!"

"What makes you think you can just come waltzing in here like nothing happened? You all went out one night, only she didn't come back. And none of you wants to say what happened, but hey, you didn't mean any harm, so you'll just drop by for old times' sake?!"

"No!"

Chad's voice suddenly got very soft. "How'd she die?"

"D-die?" Serena squeaked.

He laughed once, bitterly. "Yeah, 'die.' Do you really expect me to believe that crap the four of you told the police? Riiight. 'She just vanished into thin air.'" he mimicked. "Come on, do you honestly think the police believed you? Tell me, Serena, did they ask you the kinds of questions I got? Did they start treating you like they thought you'd been beating her or something? Did they ask you if you'd gotten her-" He broke off, and his face suddenly turned a dull red.

Chad . . . oh gods, Chad, we never meant for any of this to happen!

"Or maybe you think I'm gonna believe she ran away from home or something? Without saying good-bye or leaving a note or anything? She wouldn't have done that. She wouldn't have ditched him!" Chad jerked his hand back towards the shrine.

He'd probably forgotten I was there. He took a step forward and Serena backed up, shaking her head. "It wasn't like that," she protested.

"Or maybe it was all just a mistake? She's gonna come back any day now and everyone'll live happily ever after, right?" He took another step towards Serena.

I found myself moving between them without even thinking about it. Protecting Serena gets to be a habit after a while. Neither of them even noticed me.

"I tried to save her!" Serena wailed.

Serena, shut up! You can't tell him!

I thought he was going to keep yelling at Serena until she told him everything, but he just sort of shrunk when she said that. "She's dead," he mumbled. Like even though he'd asked how she died, he hadn't really believed it until now. Serena just nodded.

After a moment or two, he straightened up, but he still looked like someone had hit him. "Could you just go? Before her grandfather hears you and comes out here?"

It sounded like a wonderful idea to me, but Serena couldn't let it go. "Is he all right?"

"What do you think?" Chad snarled. Serena flinched, and he mumbled something that kind of sounded like an apology. "Look, Amy was here this morning. They were talking; she ran off just as I saw them; I don't know what she said to him, but he's, like, bummed. I don't want him to know you're here, okay? So could you just go?"

"Come on, Serena." Gods, what was it going to take to get her to leave?

"Are you all right, Chad?"

He didn't say anything. I grabbed Serena's elbow and pulled. Still looking at him, she took a step towards the stairs.

"He won't believe she's dead." Chad's voice was flat and empty, like he'd run out of feelings. "He keeps saying she'll come back. Like it's easier for him to think she'd want to hurt him this bad by running away. He thinks it's his fault."

"What?" Serena and I stared at him.

"Because they'd been fighting. Just one of their usual fights. He wanted to start teaching martial arts or something, and she thought he was crazy. They were yelling at each other, just like normal, and then she starts in about how she's gonna be late to meet you because he's too stubborn to admit she's right, and goes storming out of the temple." Chad seemed to be looking right through us. "But he won't believe she's dead unless they find her body. We couldn't even have a funeral. I'm trying to keep it all going, but . . . shit, I'm not a priest! It's not working! It's just me and him up here; no one's gonna let their daughters work here, not with him acting so weird all the time, and I can't run a shrine by myself!" He suddenly focused on us. "Just go away. Okay? He'll get all freaked out again if he sees you, and I can't deal any more. Please?"

"I'm . . . I'm sorry, Chad," Serena whispered. Then she spun around and headed for the stairs, Luna at her heels.

I wanted to say something. It felt completely wrong to leave him alone like that, but 'I'm sorry' sounded so . . . so small somehow, even though Serena just said it, and I couldn't think of anything else. So I ended up following her out like I'd followed her up in the first place. I looked back once, just before I went downstairs. I caught a glimpse of Raye's grandfather coming towards Chad, who hadn't moved. The way he was hobbling across the courtyard, he didn't look to be in good enough shape to teach basket weaving.

I ran down the stairs.


	13. Chapter 13

13

"And then . . . " Mina prompted.

I swallowed. "Just a minute. I want to eat some of this before it gets cold!" I deliberately looked at her mostly empty plate.

"I guess we're the only ones who didn't go to the temple yesterday," Mina said as I took another bite, "I just hung out with Artemis. We hadn't made any plans, so I didn't know where to look for the rest of you." She made a face.

"I guess it'd be a really bad idea to go there now." I nodded, chewing.

"Um . . . did it get any better after that?"

"No."

"Uh-oh."

"Uh-huh. We're just walking along, and the next thing I know, Serena's crying. Only it's not her normal waterworks-and-howling stuff; she's being all quiet about it. Majorly serious, you know? So Luna asks if she's all right, and she starts talking so softly I can hardly hear her. And she's not making a lot of sense. I mean, one minute she saying that Chad hates us, and then she goes, well, how could Raye's grandfather ever think that Raye didn't love him, and then she starts saying that the Silver Crystal wasn't strong enough to bring Raye back to life, and how she wants her back. And she's crying harder and harder and everyone's staring at us, so I'm trying to think of something to do that'd make her feel better, and Luna's not being a lot of help."

"And did you?"

"Sort of. I decided to take her to Darien's. I mean, he's her boyfriend, right? I was kind of hoping he'd be able to think of something to say, 'cause I was out of ideas. And at least she'd be able to talk to him about what really happened."

"Yeah, I guess so. So did it work?"

"Not really. He was home, so I figured I'd just kind of shove Serena at him and get out of the way. But then Serena asked me to stay. Only then she doesn't say anything to me; she just hugs Darien and cries. So I didn't think I could leave, but I'm getting really embarrassed about being right there."

Mina leaned forward, eyes wide. "What did you do?"

"I hid in the kitchen and made tea. **Lots** of tea. And when I couldn't make any more tea, I started cleaning up his kitchen. Anything to keep from going back in that room!"

"Oh no!" Mina giggled, and then looked apologetic. "I guess it wasn't very funny for you. Oh, poor Serena . . . "

"It finally got quiet, so I figured I could sneak out or something, you know? Turns out Serena fell asleep on Darien's couch, with Luna all snuggled up next to her. And Darien was very nice, and thanked me for bringing her by, and I told him he had lots of cold tea in his kitchen."

"I bet he loved hearing that."

"Mina, the guy wasn't hearing a word I said. I mean, will somebody please stop me before I act on some of my brilliant ideas?"

"What was wrong with bringing Serena over?"

"Because he worries himself sick about her when she's really, really upset. He looked like a zombie."

"He was there for her when she needed him. He's really good at that sort of thing. You can't beat yourself up for that. You were trying to help. Like you told Serena, that's not stupid."

"Yeah, I guess." If that was all that it was. I was thinking that maybe there was another reason he looked so upset. Okay, I don't think Darien ever felt anything for Raye like what he felt for Serena, but it's not like they were enemies or anything. And they **had** dated, or gone out together, or whatever it was they were doing. Only I hadn't thought until after I'd gotten Serena over there that maybe trying to help his current girlfriend feel better about his old girlfriend on her birthday might have been a bit awkward. Or maybe that wasn't it at all. It was kind of hard to tell with Darien. We didn't know each other all that well.

I got in another bite. Cold. Ugh. I swallowed it anyway.

Mina pushed a few crumbs around her plate aimlessly. "It's really screwed up, isn't it?" Not really a question. "Amy and Raye's grandfather, both of them blaming themselves for what happened . . . That wasn't one of Raye's better moves."

"What wasn't?"

"Going off to do something dangerous in the middle of a fight. Artemis got on my case once for doing that. My mom was mad at me about my grades or something, and I ran off. And then later that afternoon, I got in a fight-this was back before I found you guys-and I nearly got killed. Artemis just kept going on about what Mom would have felt if I'd died and she thought I hated her."

Yeah, that sounded like what had happened to Raye's grandfather. Too bad Artemis never gave Raye that little lecture.

Mina snorted once. "But can you see Raye letting anyone win an argument? Even if she knew for sure she wasn't coming back?" She shook her head. "I know she never means to hurt anyone, but she's just so . . . so . . . "

_So stubborn!_

"Yeah, but she **didn't** know. And anyway, it can't be changed now, so there's no point in getting mad at her!"

Mina blinked. "I wasn't. All I said was she made a mistake." We didn't say anything for a moment. Then she pointed at my plate. "Are you finished with that?"

I nodded. "It didn't taste all that good even when it was hot. But it was about the only thing left on the menu I hadn't tried, so I figured I should give it a chance."

She grinned. "Okay, I guess we have been coming here a lot. Do you want to go somewhere else next time?"

I shrugged. "No, not really. It's kind of nice."

'Kind of boring' would have been a better description. But this place got to be an instant favorite of mine when I figured out that no one from Crossroads except me ever came here. I guess it was just too far away from school. Me, I was willing to go out of my way to avoid the other kids from Crossroads, but Serena didn't have my problems with them, and she didn't want to always have to go all the way over to Mina's school. So now she was mostly hanging out with Molly, while I spent my time with Mina. And when Serena wasn't with Molly, she was with Darien. Just what I needed: a little reminder that my love life was worse off than my social life!

Besides, when those two were together . . . well, they didn't need my company.

Amy was avoiding all of us. I saw her around school, but she always seemed to be on her way somewhere and couldn't stay to talk long, and of course, she never had time anymore to get together after school. She said once that she was looking into taking some more advanced computer courses. I felt kind of guilty about not trying to stay in touch with her, but we weren't all that comfortable talking to each other. I'd never dared apologize again, but that hadn't made things any easier.

Six months after Raye died, we'd drifted apart.

Sailor Scout meetings were becoming a thing of the past. We'd had a few of them, but they were pretty horrible. Every time we met, it was like there was this big empty hole where Rate used to be, and it made things awkward. We didn't even have a good place to meet. Without the temple as an option, we shifted from one house to the next, trying to avoid all parents, since they usually looked worried if they saw the four of us together. On top of all this, Sailor Scout meetings were the one time I was guaranteed to run into Amy, which always made me wish I was somewhere else.

Basically, only Luna and Artemis really wanted us to continue meeting. We had a hard time getting motivated, since Amy had done a good job of destroying the Portal. After our return, we didn't hear any reports of youma attacks, and without an actual threat, it was pretty hard to get Serena to concentrate. She figured anything had to be more fun than being Sailor Moon, so she set new records for lateness.

With Amy, it was a different matter. Amy didn't hate being Sailor Mercury, but she wasn't passionate about the idea either. And then **she** started being late to Scout meetings. This was weird. We expected Serena to be late, but Amy always knew what time it was. So Mina and Serena started kidding her about it. She apologized, of course. She said she'd gotten involved in a special project, and that it was taking more time than she had expected. We asked her what it was, but she just raised an eyebrow and said that it involved computer programming and physics, and did we really want to know more? Uh-uhn, we answered hastily, and let her get back to whatever it was.

Amy got more and more into her 'special project.' I still ate lunch with Serena, but since Molly almost always ate with us, we couldn't talk about Scout business even if we'd wanted to. So we talked about school, and clothes, and guys, and somehow the idea that once upon a time this blonde girl was a princess I'd sworn to give my life for seemed about as real as the fairy tale it sounded like. Most of the time, I was with Mina. After a while, I realized that I was probably the only Sailor Scout that Mina saw with any frequency. None of us went to her school, no one ever saw Amy anymore except by accident, and Serena had probably forgotten that Sailor Moon ever existed. And yet it didn't really seem to matter much.

Luna and Artemis finally had had it. They called a Sailor Scout meeting and informed us that they would tolerate no lateness, no absences, no foolishness of any sort. It was probably a sign of how far we'd gone that their anger didn't even bother us all that much.

We met at Mina's house. Coming to the meeting, I was looking over my grades and groaning. They were almost as bad as Serena's (which I knew as well as my own; she'd spent all of lunch that day whining about them). It probably shouldn't have been much of a surprise. I was amazed I hadn't flunked out altogether. I'd spent so much time in detention for fighting that it was like a second home-when I wasn't actually being suspended. The teachers tried to be understanding, but I couldn't open up to them like they hoped I would. They wanted me to put it all behind me and move forward. I didn't see how I was supposed to forget about Raye and get on with my life while all the other students were treating me like her murderer, but I could hardly tell them that.

It was strange seeing all of us together. Of course I saw Serena and Mina almost every day, but not together, and I hadn't seen Amy in so long that she seemed like a stranger.

And again, there was strained silence, just like our first meeting after Raye's death. Serena played with one of her ponytails, looking bored. Amy was surreptitiously sliding a book out of her bag to study. I looked over at Mina, who looked back and shrugged.

Luna and Artemis did their best to inspire us. It failed. There just didn't seem to be any reason to keep meeting. We danced around the subject as best we could, to spare their feelings, but we made it pretty plain that unless there was some reason to get back together, the Sailor Scouts were through.

After that, leaving as quickly as possible seemed to be the best course of action. We all felt uncomfortable when we looked at Luna and Artemis, who mostly seemed to be stunned. Frankly, I didn't see any reason to linger. Apparently neither did Amy or Serena. They were headed for the stairs almost before we'd said good-bye. Too bad they decided to go down them at the same time.

CRASH! Books, papers, Serena, and Amy went flying in all directions.

So much for a smooth exit, allowing us to get away from Luna and Artemis before we got too embarrassed. Mina and I flew to help the others sort themselves out. Amy was at the top of the stairs, clinging to the bannister for dear life. Serena was sprawled at the bottom, slowly being buried as papers drifted down over her.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Luna, poking her head out from Mina's room. "Are you all right, Serena?" She darted past us and leaped nimbly to the bottom of the stairs.

"Oww," groaned our ever-graceful princess. "That wasn't any fun. I wanna go home."

Mina carefully stepped around Amy and joined Luna at the bottom of the stairs. Serena was sitting up, rubbing her left elbow and making faces. Artemis had followed Luna out and was looking at Amy concernedly.

"And how're you doing?" I asked her.

"I'm fine," she murmured, not quite looking at me. Even after six months, we still couldn't relax enough around each other to have the most basic of conversations.

"You two really did a good job of messing the place up," Artemis sighed. "Well, come on! We need to get this stuff sorted out."

It turned into a sort of impromptu party. We each grabbed a pile of papers and started dividing them into "Serena" and "Amy" piles. Not terribly hard to do, considering the differences in grades.

Math test. Grade: 35%. Serena.

Math test made up of equations I'd never seen before in my life. Grade: 100%. Amy.

History paper. Grade: 60%. Serena.

Physics test. Grade: 100%. Amy.

Lit Studies essay. Grade: 82%. Serena? Wow, she was doing better than I imagined. What was she complaining about if she was getting grades like this?

Another math test. Grade: 100%. Amy. Of course.

"Did you two **try** to mix your papers together perfectly?" Mina asked wryly. "I couldn't shuffle mine so thoroughly if I practiced!"

"Hey, I'm just naturally talented!" Serena burbled happily. She seemed to have recovered from her fall all right: she'd grabbed a pillow and was watching us sort things out instead of doing any work herself.

"Now which one of you is getting a perfect score in advanced something- or-othereth?" Mina wondered sardonically. "This must be Amy's." She slapped another test onto a growing pile of papers with small, precise handwriting. "Oh, and here's a report card. **Somebody** is getting an A in . . . " Her voice trailed off.

I dropped another perfect physics test onto my "Amy" pile. Looking at Amy's grades was depressing, even when I'd figured out long ago that she was so far ahead of the rest of us academically that there was no sense in even thinking about her GPA. Today it just reminded me of how bad my grades were.

"Amy?" There was a peculiar note in Mina's voice. I looked up. She was frowning at the report card she held. "Are these **really** your grades?"

"Give me that, please." Amy reached for the report card. Mina didn't budge.

"You're getting a B+ in Lit Studies? An A- in Biology?"

"My grades are none of your business. Would you please give me that report card?"

"Amy, this is a B! You don't get B's!"

"Give me that!" Amy lunged for the report card. Mina let her have it. She jammed it into her bookbag, her face bright red. We stared at her. I didn't know if I was more shocked by her grades or by her nearly attacking Mina. Even Serena had sat up and had a confused look on her face, glancing back and forth between Mina and Amy.

"What's going on?" Mina had a determined look on her face. "Those would be wonderful grades for the rest of us, but they're pretty bad for you."

Amy tried to put a good face on it. "Look, it's been rough for all of us the past few months. My lowest grade is a B. I'm hardly going to flunk out of junior high with an A- average."

I picked up my "Serena" pile. Near the top was the Lit Studies essay I thought she'd done so well on. I looked at it again. The handwriting was definitely Amy's.

This didn't make sense. My grades were all going down, even home ec, which I loved. I could tell from the papers I'd sorted that Amy was still doing wonderfully in some subjects. Math, for instance. Physics. Computer Science. But she was a bit off in Biology, and she really liked Biology, so why-?

"It's your 'special project,' isn't it?" I don't know what made me guess that, but from the look that flashed across her face, I knew I was right. "First it made you late to Scout meetings, and you were never late before. Now it's pulling your grades down? Maybe you'd better tell us what you're doing after all, even if it **is** all about computers and physics."

"If it really is that same project, you've been working on it for months," Mina added. "What kind of school project takes so long? Even you aren't doing college theses yet."

Amy looked past us towards the door, as if she'd rather leave than answer our questions. Too bad for her that we were between her and the door. I wasn't moving until she explained what was going on.

_What on earth could be obsessing her this badly? Math. Computers. Physics. C'mon, Lita, what sort of project would use those subjects that she wouldn't want to tell us-?_

"You want to reopen the Portal," Serena whispered.

Amy flinched.

It made sense. Oh gods, it made sense.

"Amy, what . . . what good . . . Amy, she's dead! What good is opening the Portal going to do now?"

Maybe that wasn't the best way to say it. Amy's face grew hard, but all she said was, "We don't know that."

I gaped at her. It had never occurred to me that she could believe that Raye was still alive. After six months? In the N **egaverse?**

"Is this why you were asking me about-?" Serena broke off.

"You said so yourself: you've never seen her. If you saw her last time, it seems only reasonable that you should have seen her this time as well."

"What are you two talking about?" Artemis demanded.

Not taking her eyes from Amy, Serena answered him. "Amy asked me if I'd ever seen Raye's ghost after . . . um . . . you know. And I haven't."

A ghost? Amy-scientific Amy-was only going to accept a g **host** as proof that Raye was dead?

"Would you have seen her?" Mina asked Serena, frowning. "I mean, is that part of being who we are? We appear as ghosts to each other when we die? Because I certainly haven't seen her." She looked away. "Not that I remember, anyway."

This was getting just a bit too weird for me. I didn't quite get the ghost bit. I remember dying, and I sort of remember trying to keep Serena's spirits up when she was alone (but how did I know she was alone if I was dead?), and there's something about joining her and . . . and . . . I've never been able to remember anything more about that.

When we all got our memories back, we compared notes. So I know what happened, but it's like a story that happened to someone else named Lita. All the girls swore that they saw me appear moments after I died, dressed in my school uniform, and that I looked happy. I don't remember a thing about it,

myself. So I'm willing to take their word for it that it happened, but it's hard to really believe them. I was pretty sure that if I'd seen Raye's ghost in the past six months I wouldn't have forgotten it-but part of me didn't believe in ghosts in the first place.

"If any of us would have seen her, it would have been Serena," Amy answered.

"How do you know that?" I couldn't believe we were having this discussion.

"How else do you explain that she knew I had died even though we were nowhere near each other? Even Mina and Raye didn't know until she told them."

I didn't have a snappy answer for that one. Anyway, how was I supposed to argue about stuff that happened after I died?

"Do you really think she's alive, Amy?" The expression on Serena's face nearly killed me. Hope, longing, perfect trust . . . if Amy told her that Raye was alive, Serena would believe her without question.

I held my breath. But inside, I felt anger growing. _Don't you do this. Don't you_ _ **dare**_ _get her hopes up. She trusts you to know what you're talking about-and even I can tell you don't have any real evidence that Raye's alive!_

Amy opened her mouth. For a minute, I thought she'd do it. I really thought she'd tell Serena that Raye was alive, that if she could reopen the Portal, we could still save her. And then something just drained out of her, and her shoulders slumped. "I don't . . . I don't **know,** Serena." Her voice was almost inaudible when she continued, "But I have to know. Somehow."

"And what happens if you **can't** know? Are you going to try to reopen the Portal for the rest of your life? If you haven't gotten it open in six months, what makes you think you're going to succeed now?" It wasn't the gentlest way to put it, but something about Amy was starting to scare me. This wasn't

determination, this was a full-blown obsession, and all about something that was out of her control now.

Amy might have said something, but Mina cut in. "Does it have to affect the rest of your grades so badly? Can't you work on this without dragging down your GPA?"

And then Amy smiled. It was that same sweet, timid, apologetic little smile that I've learned to hate over the past two years, but this was the first time I'd ever seen it, and like a fool, I believed it.

"You're right, of course. I guess I **have** been letting this get a bit out of control." I relaxed slightly as she went on. "So maybe this collision was something of a wake-up call, hmm? Look, I promise, I'll go straight home and study biology and history tonight, not Portal-opening. Deal?"

"Deal!" Serena's agreement was enthusiastic enough, but for a minute I thought I saw a shadow pass over her face. "Careful, Amy-you don't want your grades down where mine and Lita's hang out!"

My grades. Ouch. She **would** go and remind me.


	14. Chapter 14

14

We wanted to believe Amy of course. Even if everyone was going to suspect me for the rest of my life of murdering Raye, I wanted the others to be luckier. I figured Serena and Mina probably stood a good chance of living normal lives again. Heck, Mina didn't even remember what happened except secondhand. So why couldn't Amy be like them?

I don't know why I ever thought Amy would let herself be a normal teenager again after what happened. Probably because I wanted to stop feeling guilty for what I'd said to her. She didn't stop working on her project, of course. She'd just said that to get us to stop worrying about her. And it worked for a while. None of us were in classes with her, so we didn't see her grades frequently. We didn't see much of her either, since we didn't have Sailor Scout meetings anymore. But I guess the real reason we decided that Amy had given up was that she never told us that she'd figured out how to do it. We're talking Amy Mizuno here. The girl solved complicated physics problems in minutes, so how hard could she find it to reopen the Portal? I decided it was because she wasn't trying, because she was getting on with her life. And since that was what I wanted her to do, I didn't complain.

Even without us constantly spending time with her, Amy couldn't keep her life a secret forever. I was eating lunch by myself one day with my back to a tree. Nancy and her best friend Pam settled in for lunch on the other side of the tree, apparently not realizing that I was nearby. I thought about moving-their presence was enough to ruin my appetite-but if I got up, they'd probably notice me. Just what I needed in my life: more acid comments about my height, my taste in school uniforms, or my lack of boyfriends. So I tried to eat as fast as I could and ignore them.

"Oh, look," Pam's drawl cut into my thoughts. "There's the little genius of Crossroads Junior High." There was only one person that Pam would call a genius in such a vicious tone of voice: Amy. Pam was a pretty good student and got better grades than Nancy, but she was just as nasty and egotistical, and having Amy constantly show her up in class must have annoyed the hell out of her. Now Amy got good grades because she was smart, but Pam was the sort of person who would think that Amy was showing off, and she hated her for that.

I forgot lunch. Moving as quietly as I could, I turned around so I could look past the tree and over Nancy's shoulder. Amy was headed across the yard, but she had apparently stopped when she saw Pam and Nancy.

"Genius?" Nancy purred. She raised her voice slightly. "Tell us, Amy, are you a genius?" Amy started to walk past them, but Nancy stood up smoothly and moved in front of her. Amy could either stop or run into her. She stopped.

"She doesn't seem to want to talk to you." Pam rose and moved to join Nancy. "Little snob like her wouldn't lower herself to talk to dummies like us." Amy's eyes narrowed, but she said nothing.

"It wouldn't matter anyway," Nancy said sadly. "She'd use big words. We probably couldn't understand them."

I wanted to strangle them. After this many months of basically not speaking to each other, Amy and I were hardly what you'd call best friends, but . . . but . . . dammit, this was **Amy**! How could I just let Nancy and Pam go after her and not do something? But knowing what Nancy thought of me, they'd just pick on Amy even harder if they knew we were friends, so I forced myself to stay behind the tree. And Amy was good at controlling her temper-unlike me-so they'd probably get bored and leave her alone in a minute or so.

"Excuse me," Amy said, her voice tight. "I'd like to get past, okay?" She tried to move around Pam, who simply stepped in front of her again.

"Oh, but Nancy, she's not being a snob. **Are** you, Amy? She's in shock. The little genius just got her first C, you know." Pam's tone was all sympathy and understanding.

"A C? An actual C? You poor thing. What's the matter? Not studying hard enough?"

"Maybe she's got a boyfriend. Maybe she doesn't have time to study anymore."

I was having trouble focusing on the conversation. My mind was still stuck back a few moments. Back at the point when Pam had told Nancy about Amy's C.

Amy had lied to us. She was still working on getting the Portal open.

"Well, it can't be Greg," Pam was musing. "He liked her all right, back when he was in our class, but she was smart then. A C student like Amy couldn't keep up with him. She'd bore him, you know."

"Then who?" Nancy asked. "Must be someone who likes blue hair. Can't be too many boys around here who find **that** pretty. C'mon Amy, who's your secret love? You can tell us! Oh, look, Pam, she's going to cry."

Cry? Ha. Amy was shaking all right, but I could tell it was fury, not misery. But any hope I'd had that they'd leave her alone after a few taunts was gone. So I could hardly make things worse by butting in, right? Besides, I wanted to talk to her. Now.

I whipped around the tree, leaving lunch behind. Amy's eyes widened when she saw me, and her reaction caused Pam and Nancy to turn around.

"Why, it's the Giraffe," Nancy exclaimed. "I don't remember asking you to join-hey!" I'd taken the straightest path possible to Amy, by shoving between Nancy and Pam. Neither of them appreciated this. I ignored them.

"Come on," I muttered to Amy. I grabbed her hand, to bring her along with me. She stiffened and looked down at our hands. Then I remembered. The last time I'd touched Amy was when I was yelling at her that she'd killed Raye. I dropped her hand instantly, and she spun around and stalked off.

I followed, of course. Even if she was hurt, I had to talk to her. Behind me, I could hear Pam gasp, "Maybe it's not a **boyfriend,** Nancy!"

Wonderful. I'd made it worse for both of us after all. But there'd be time enough later to worry about that. Right now we had other things to talk about.

"I could have handled them, you know," Amy snapped as I caught up with her. "You didn't have to rescue me."

"Who said anything about rescuing you? Let's talk about your grades. What on earth did you get a C in?"

"If my grades were none of your business four months ago, what makes you think I'm going to share them with you now?"

"Maybe I should ask Pam Hijikata! But wait! Why should I bother? By tomorrow, she'll have told everyone in school!"

Amy scowled. "If you must know, it was history. And it's not that I don't know what we're doing! I . . . I just haven't had time to do all the assignments."

"Because you spend all your time working on reopening the Portal," I said flatly. "You lied to us, Amy. How could you?!"

"I never said I'd stop."

"Are you listening to yourself? You may not have said in so many words that you'd stop, but that's what you made us think. And you had no intention of giving up, did you? So why'd you **lie**?"

"What am I doing that is so wrong? I am simply trying to find out once and for all if Raye is dead. To finish it one way or another. Why does that bother you so much?"

"You aren't 'simply' trying to do anything! You are letting the rest of your life go to hell while you try to break into the Negaverse of all places!"

"We've barely talked in ten months. Why this sudden concern for my welfare?" Amy demanded.

I didn't know what to say. I guess after ten months, we weren't really friends anymore . . . but I didn't hate her the way I did Nancy . . . and it wasn't like she was just some other kid at school that I didn't know . . .

In a sudden burst of anger, I decided she was right. Why were we even having this discussion? If she wanted to throw her GPA away, that was her business, right? I had enough problems of my own-I certainly didn't need to start worrying about her too. If she wanted to deal with-

-there was something different about her. Something was wrong. I studied her, trying to figure out what it was.

She looked so tired. No, worse than tired. Sick. She wasn't exactly tan and robust at the best of times, but she'd always looked healthy. Now she seemed pale, and . . . well, not skinny as though she didn't eat anymore, but kind of . . . I don't know, like she was stretched thin somehow, even if it wasn't physical.

"Is something wrong?"

"Wrong?"

"You're staring at me."

"I am?"

She nodded.

Silence. I tried to look at anything except her.

_Is she sick? What's-_

"Well?"

"Why . . . how did it get this bad? It's . . . I . . . " And then it poured out. "We were friends. I don't have a lot of those anymore. I don't want to lose anoth-"

Horrified, I made myself shut up. _Crybaby! You sound like a little girl whining because no one wants to play with her!_

More silence. I glanced at her. Her face was turned away from me and she seemed to be looking down at the floor.

"Look, I shouldn't have dumped this on you." I was suddenly so embarrassed I could barely think. Backing away, I added, "I'll just-"

"Wait." It was barely a whisper. I stopped. After a minute she continued. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have . . . I'm not mad at you. I don't want to argue with you or anyone else. But I have to know if Raye-" She looked uncomfortable. "But it bothers you. All of you. The way Serena was when we were all at Mina's-I don't know anything! Not enough to tell her. She always feels so responsible for us, so she keeps asking me if I've found out anything and I haven't, but she still asks. And Mina beats herself up for not remembering anything. It's like she thinks that she mustn't have liked Raye as much as the rest of us or else she'd remember. Her doctors told her this sort of thing happens with head injuries- **-I** even told her that-but I don't think she really believes us. And you-" She broke off, flushing. "Well. You know. You think I'm wasting my time. So . . . " Her voice trailed off.

"So you decided it was easier to avoid us rather than always have to talk about it?" I groaned. Me and my big ego. I'd thought she was avoiding me because of that whole business about my trying to apologize to her. And Mina went to another school, so I figured they just didn't see that much of each other. If Amy knew this about her, they probably had spent time together after all. I saw Mina a lot, and I'd never thought she'd feel guilty about not getting her memories back. And, well, yeah, I knew Serena wanted to believe Raye was alive, but I didn't know she was still expecting Amy to come up with the answer.

"So now what?" Amy asked after a minute or so.

I looked back at her. Amy's eyes were feverishly bright. I wanted to ask if she was all right, but we were actually having a conversation here, and I didn't want to ruin it. Besides, her mom was a doctor. If Amy were really sick, her mom would be doing something about it, right?

I tried to choose my next words very carefully. I really didn't want to say the wrong thing right when it looked like we might actually be able to patch things up between us, but I was worried about her. "Just where are you grade-wise, anyway?" She frowned. I said hastily, "I'm not going to yell at you. Promise! But is this C the worst of it?"

"Mostly," she said finally.

"Mostly?" Okay, I'd just promised her I wouldn't yell. Funny-I didn't remember her being this evasive in the past.

"We haven't gotten final test scores in Biology yet. And the last paper I wrote for Lit Studies wasn't very good." She looked stunned, like telling me about all this was the first time she'd let herself think about how bad things were getting. "And . . . but it's not really grades . . . "

"It's all right. Tell me."

"There's this program. If they accept you, you get to study in Germany . . . " For just a second she looked sort of wistful and happy, and not sick or stunned at all. Like the Amy I used to know. And then she snapped back to the present. "It's really meant for high school students, but I'm sure I could handle the academics. I was really interested in it, and I knew there'd be a lot of other applicants, so I applied way early, just before we shut the Portal." She swallowed. "Last week, they called me in. They're too

worried about how unstable my grades have been recently. So they asked me to defer my application.

"It's-it's not like they'll never accept me," she added quickly. "I can apply again next year. In high school, li-like you're supposed to." She was trying to smile, but her lower lip was trembling. I stared at her, wondering what to say. "But I'm **not** stupid-no matter what Pam says! **I could have done it-!** " Her voice cracked.

"Amy?" Instinctively I reached for her.

And then I was hugging her as she started sobbing.


	15. Chapter 15

15

One year ago, Raye died.

I don't want to think about it.


	16. Chapter 16

16

Compared to Crossroads, high school was paradise.

We actually hadn't been sure we were going to make it in the first place. Amy came through for us when she finally realized that if she didn't help us cram for the entrance exam, she'd be the only Sailor Scout in high school. Mina, Serena, and I were practically in a three-way tie for Lowest Passing Score-but we **did** pass!

It was fantastic. My uniform matched everyone else's. I wasn't the tallest girl in school anymore-there had to be at least two other girls as tall as I was. Nancy and Pam weren't in any of our classes, and students from other junior highs just didn't remember us from last year's news. Anonymity-wonderful, glorious anonymity!

I wasn't the only one fading into the background. Amy's grades finally settled in the low B's and upper C's. I wondered if anyone who didn't know her in junior high ever realized how smart she really was. Amy herself always acted like getting normal, average grades didn't bother her, so maybe I wasn't supposed to noticed that she never reapplied for that study-abroad program in Germany.

I think high school was just like junior high for Serena except that now Mina went to our school. She just kept on going on romantic walks with Darien, playing video games, and hanging out at the mall with the rest of us, and her major worry was keeping her dad from freaking out over Darien's age. If Luna and her parents hadn't constantly nagged her, she'd never have touched her homework.

I basically found out what Mina was up to by accident. The Kitamuras had gone out for the evening, leaving me alone at home with a page of physics problems that were making less sense every time I looked at them. Obviously it was time for some TV: a bit of mindless entertainment to soothe my tortured brain cells.

So much for soothing: the evening news was on. While the newscaster chattered on about economic trends, I started hunting for the TV listings. The problem was, Mr. Kitamura's magazines were trying to take over the living room-finding the one I was looking for was taking forever.

"And, wrapping up today's top stories, this jewelry store security camera caught the return of a familiar face to Tokyo's streets . . . "

Ha. Hidden in plain sight right on top of the TV itself. Rolling my eyes, I walked towards it and-

_What on earth?!_

There wasn't any sound, and the video was kind of grainy, and only in black and white. Still, you could figure out what was going on pretty easily. Two masked men had ordered everyone to lie down on the floor. They were stuffing jewelry into bags when one of them looked up at something-or someone-out of range of the camera. He brought his gun up and around, firing at whatever it was. And then you could see his head go up and back as he watched it move up and over his head.

The next minute, a blonde girl appeared, landing between them, moving so fast that neither of them stood a chance. One second, she was recovering from her leap over the counter; the next, guns were flying out of the men's hands, and a second after that, she'd knocked them out. After checking them both-maybe to see if they were really unconscious, or maybe to make sure she hadn't hurt them too badly-she stood up, faced the camera, and smiled, making a triumphant victory sign at the camera. Then she leaped back over the counter and out of the picture again.

Actually, I thought it was Serena until she faced the camera. Never mind that you'd never get Serena to go after armed robbers by herself, and she doesn't know those kinds of martial-arts moves anyway. And yeah, the hairstyle was all wrong. It was just that the uniform was dark enough, and it was hard to see her clearly until she finished with the robbers. But then she did look straight at the camera and there's no way to mistake Mina for Serena when you know what you're looking for.

Even when she's wearing a mask.

_Sailor V? Mina, what's going on?_

Phone, phone, I had to get to a phone and call her. But all I got was the answering machine. I thought about using my communicator, but dying of curiosity wasn't really an emergency. Besides, what if she was out with her parents? How would she explain owning something that sounded like a beeper?

I could call Serena. But I'd bet she didn't know any more than I did, and she'd just pester me with a million questions. If I knew why Mina was being Sailor V again, I wouldn't need to ask Serena!

I could also call Amy. She probably didn't know anything either, but her guesses would be a lot more realistic than Serena's.

Of course, Amy had been out sick again for the past week. I shouldn't bother her if she wasn't feeling all that great. And if she was feeling better, she'd need to catch up on her homework. She didn't like to be distracted from studying, anyway.

_I don't want to hear about the Portal again._

I didn't call.


	17. Chapter 17

17

All I wanted to do at school the next day was talk to Mina, so naturally I couldn't find her. I saw Serena and Molly at lunch, but Serena was acting like nothing weird had happened. Maybe she hadn't seen the news at all. I was dying to tell her, but I didn't think I could act like it was just a bit of mildly interesting news and not give away anything to Molly, so I made myself not say anything about it at all. No sign of Amy.

I finally spotted Mina when school was letting out. I thought about going and getting Serena, but I couldn't think of a way to break her away from Molly. So I settled for dragging Mina back behind the school, since there was no one around, and demanding that she tell me everything.

"You saw me?" Mina was thrilled.

"Of course I saw you-you were on the news, Mina!"

"Yeah," Mina sighed, looking absolutely blissed out. "But you're the first person to mention it to me."

"I don't know if Amy saw you. If she did, she didn't call to tell me. Serena probably missed the news entirely."

"You didn't tell her?"

"I'm sorry-I didn't realize I was your PR agency! Besides, every time I see Serena, Molly's with her. If I told them I'd seen Sailor V on TV . . . well, knowing Serena, she'd have blurted your name out without even thinking."

Mina winced, imagining it.

"So why all the secrecy? You could have told us you wanted to be Sailor V again."

"I wasn't trying to keep it a secret! I just didn't know I was going to do it until I got started. See, I was headed home yesterday, and I just happened to be by the jewelry store when I looked in and realized it was a robbery. And it was like instinct or something-I ran around the corner and transformed. I wasn't even planning on being Sailor V instead of Sailor Venus-I just did it! I guess because I've always stopped normal criminals as Sailor V; it just feels more natural that way. And then you saw the rest," she finished hastily. "But it was so cool, Lita! When I left the store, the people outside had been watching, and they started clapping and cheering! And the police were just getting there, and they thanked me." She was practically glowing.

"So what does Artemis think about it?"

"He hasn't talked much about it yet. I'd have thought he'd have been really happy. You know-because both he and Luna were so disappointed when we all quit. But he's not majorly pissed off at me. I can tell when he's like that." She shrugged. "Maybe he hasn't made up his mind yet. He's not here right now. You know, I bet he's off talking to Luna about it or something." She grinned mischievously. "I think I totally shocked him by doing it, though. It was fun. I sort of miss doing that sort of thing, don't you?"

"No."

It came out instantly. I didn't even think about it, but when I heard myself say it, it sounded strange. I guess Mina thought so too, because she stared at me like I'd said it in a foreign language.

"Sorry," she said after a moment. "I thought you liked being Sailor Jupiter."

"I did. I do! It's . . . it's exciting. Different."

"But?"

"But nothing. It's not bad being a Sailor Scout."

"But you don't want to be one. Why not? You used to like it. Right after Luna gave us all our memories back, the way you were talking, you sounded like you'd been bored stiff being normal."

"I was!" I paused. "But it's not the same anymore. It's not fun for me now. You know."

"Oh." Mina looked away. When she started talking again, she sounded a lot less enthusiastic. "I know Serena's never been crazy about being Sailor Moon, and Amy's probably always going to blame herself for what happened to Raye, but I decided, 'hey, that's just them, you know?' But it's all of you, isn't it? **I'm** the weird one here, not you guys."

"Mina! You're not wei-"

"Look, just let me finish, okay?" she snapped. I could feel my cheeks getting warm.

"It's . . . I know you told me Raye died. I know I was there. But I remember coming back from the dead better than I remember that night! So . . . look, I don't know what it's like for the rest of you, but it feels to me like Raye disappeared and then we just quit!" She still wasn't looking at me. "The last time you were Sailor Jupiter, we lost Raye, and you and I got hurt, and everything fell apart. So I can see why none of you really want to keep on being Sailor Scouts. But that's not what it's like for **me,** Lita. I mean, yes, the last time I really was Sailor Venus was that night, but the last time I *remember* being Sailor Venus was two days earlier when we trashed those youma over by your old school. And we decided to seal the Portal, so we made all our plans, and I was psyching myself up to go, and **blink:** no more Raye. And we just . . . stopped.

"I don't want to quit," she muttered. She had folded her hands in her lap and was staring down at them. "Okay, maybe I'm weird, maybe there's something wrong with me, but I don't want to quit. It doesn't feel right to be Sailor Venus, not without the rest of you, but I don't want to just be plain old Mina Aino for the rest of my life." She took a deep breath. "So it's the return of Sailor V. You like?"

"Mina," I began hesitantly. _Please, just once, let this come out the way I want it to . . ._ "Mina, it shouldn't matter if I like it or not. If it's something you want to do, then do it!"

She didn't look up. "Is it going to be a problem for you guys?"

"Huh? Why?" Why was she acting like this all of a sudden? It was like she thought being Sailor Venus or Sailor V or whatever was something to be ashamed of.

"Because you remember . . . well, **that,** and . . . oh, I don't know!"

"And you don't. We know that, Mina. And, okay, you're right: it's never going to be the same for me or Serena or Amy. But that doesn't mean you have to stop if you don't want to."

She still didn't look convinced. I didn't get it. Why . . . oh.

"Stop it!" I snapped. Mina's head jerked up in surprise and I managed to catch her gaze. "It's not your fault you can't remember. You just happened to be the one who got hit on the head. It could have been any of us. And I bet if anyone else had gotten hit that hard, we wouldn't remember what happened either! Look, I know you don't believe me, but you're lucky! You don't know what I'd give to trade places with you, to not remember that night. And maybe Serena and Amy feel the exact same way; I don't know. But it's not like we're mad at you about it!"

She didn't say anything for a moment, and I wondered if maybe I'd said the wrong thing after all. I suddenly noticed how quiet everything had gotten, so I looked around. By now everyone had left. It was kind of eerie.

"I keep expecting to see her." Mina looked like she was confessing some deep, dark secret. "I run into the three of you, and I still think, 'Oh, Raye'll be here any second now.' Why doesn't it feel like she's really gone?"

"Because Amy won't let it go, maybe?" I growled, sounding a little more irritated than I'd meant to. Maybe it bothered Mina, because she went all silent again.

"What if she's right?" she asked finally. "I know you don't like to talk about it, but what if Amy's been right all along? If Raye's alive . . . and we left her there . . . "

"Oh, don't **do** this to yourself! You'll drive yourself crazy with guilt just like Amy's doing. I know you don't remember it, but they were trying to kill us! If you'd gotten hit any harder, you might be a vegetable, or maybe you'd be dead. If we hadn't gotten through the Portal when we did, we'd **all** be dead! So why would they suddenly change their minds and decide to keep Raye alive?" Mina didn't say anything, so I took a deep breath and pushed on. "Especially 'cause Raye wouldn't have stopped fighting them." Not Raye. Raye had gone up against two of the Doom 'n Gloom Girls. She wouldn't have just surrendered to the youma. It'd be like letting them win-and Raye'd always had to be the best.

"She . . . wouldn't have made it easy for the youma." Mina sounded like she agreed with me, but she didn't look entirely convinced that I was right. Which didn't make any sense. Did she **want** to believe that Raye was still alive? I mean, not that I wanted her to be dead, but after almost a year and a

half . . . well, lots of things could have happened to Raye, none of which I wanted to think about.

While I was shoving these unpleasant thoughts out of my mind as fast as possible, Mina was getting up slowly.

"I . . . need to think about this. All of this: the Sailor V bit, and what you just said, and everything, okay?"

"Uh, yeah. Sure. Whatever."

She looked back at me and tried to smile. "Hey, don't worry! It'll work out, right?" And suddenly there was a real smile, just for a second. "Catch you later!"

And she was gone.


	18. Chapter 18

18

She went for it, of course. Even if she felt guilty about not remembering that night, Mina was too much in love with being a Sailor Scout to give it up for forever. Much to her delight, it didn't take long for the media to catch on that Sailor V was back to stay. Soon Mina's face could be seen throughout Tokyo almost daily, just like when we were thirteen.

She was in heaven. Pretty and popular as Mina Aino was, it wasn't like people were begging her for autographs, trying to get interviews with her on national TV, or forming fan clubs around her. Sailor V got all this and more. Mina loved every minute of it.

Amy's reaction to Mina's decision was . . . well . . . subdued. Mina didn't wait for her to find out on her own like I had; she tracked Amy down and told her directly. The way Mina told me about it afterwards, Amy just stared at her blankly for a moment. Then she wished Mina good luck in a distracted tone, almost like she hadn't heard a word Mina had said, and walked off. Mina looked like she still wasn't sure if she should be hurt or relieved by Amy's indifference. But she figured telling Amy would be the worst of it. After all, Serena used to idolize Sailor V. She'd probably be thrilled to hear that Mina was going back to her first secret identity.

Uh-uhn. "Terrified" would be a better description of Serena's reaction. Never mind that Mina had been a Sailor Scout longer than any of us, or that with the Portal closed, the toughest enemies she'd probably ever have to face would be thieves, like at the jewelry store-Serena was convinced that Mina was going to get seriously hurt. So convinced, in fact, that she almost ordered Mina not to do it, not to run the risk.

I think that's what really got to Mina: Serena's lack of confidence in her. Oh, she tried not to let it bother her. When she told me about it later, she made the whole story sound really funny. But even as we were laughing about how far Mina had had to go to try to reassure Serena, I was thinking that she sounded more uneasy than anything else. Not that I said anything. She wasn't talking about it herself, and I didn't want to make it sound like I doubted her skills too. After all, the one thing we'd learned about being Sailor Scouts was that you had to believe in yourself for the magic to work, and she was having a hard enough time ignoring Serena's worries.

I didn't see as much of Mina after she really started getting into being Sailor V. I don't know why this surprised me. Being a fighter for justice took time of course, she explained and if it wasn't going to cut into her classes or studying ( **what** studying? This was Mina!), it had to come out of her free time. I kept telling myself that I couldn't get mad at her about it though. Heck, wasn't I the one who'd told her that if this was something she really wanted to do, then she should go for it no matter what? I guess I hadn't thought she'd take practicing so seriously though. When she wasn't running around actually being Sailor V in public, she was off by herself, drilling on this particular kick or that weird little maneuver. She never practiced this much when she was Sailor Venus, so why was she getting so obsessed with it now?

It was kind of silly, though. People were acting like she was doing such wonderful things, but she wasn't. I was a Sailor Scout too. I knew it wasn't that hard to catch criminals, not if you're stronger and faster than normal people and you've got magic.

I teased her once about all the attention she was getting. She just gave me this cool little smile, almost as bad as Nancy's, and said that nothing was stopping me from pulling out my pen and joining her. Like I'd be Sailor Jupiter just to get my own fan club or have dolls and video games about me! And it was really dumb how suddenly every girl in Tokyo wanted to bleach her hair and tie a big red bow in it . . . and how all the guys thought Sailor V wanna-bes were so cute and pretty . . .

But after a while, all this became normal, like Mina had always been Sailor V, and the rest of us being Sailor Scouts was just a dream or something. So when I got a phone call from her one afternoon asking me to come over to her house right away, I didn't even think it might be Scout business until I walked in the front door and saw Amy and Serena, both of them looking kind of confused. Luna and Artemis were there as well, and they were pretty grim.

Mina didn't look either confused or grim. Mina looked majorly pissed off. And a bit sweaty and mussed-up, like she'd just had a good workout.

"Don't any of you carry your communicators anymore?" she burst out before I'd even had a chance to say hello.

Uh-oh. The last I'd seen of mine, it was somewhere at the back of one of my drawers, buried under whatever clothing I hadn't felt like sorting. Serena mumbled "Communicators?" like she'd never heard of one in her life. Amy suddenly looked guilty.

"I could have used some help this afternoon!"

"Against thieves? Oh, come on. You want to tell us that the great Sailor V couldn't handle a few mere mortals by herself?"

"Not thieves. I wouldn't have had a problem with thieves, Lita." Mina's voice was chilly and very precise.

"Then what-" Serena began.

"Youma."

Utter silence.

" **How**?" Amy's anguished question sliced through the white noise in my brain. "Nothing's come through the Portal. Mina, I'd **know** if something opened a Portal from the Negaverse!"

Oh gods. Oh gods-bad enough that Raye died, but if we hadn't even managed to seal the youma away . . .

"Tell them," Artemis prodded.

And the story spilled out. Mina had been headed home from school. Discovering that it was a lot later than she'd thought, she'd stopped off at a pay phone to call home.

"Not that it mattered. Obviously Mom's not home. So I was picking my stuff up again to head out, when I heard someone scream down at the other end of the block. And there was this youma, just floating in the air. People were stopping and staring at it. And the next thing I know, it starts shooting out these blue beams of light from all over its body, and anyone who got hit by one started turning blue too, and they weren't moving anymore. So I transformed.

"It wasn't paying much attention to anything around it, or else I probably couldn't have gotten very close to it. It was made of blue crystal. It started shooting its light beams at me when it finally noticed me, but I managed to duck out of the way in time. So I figure, 'hey, this is a major monster here; I'll just call my friends for some help.' Only, none of you answered!"

"Oops," Serena mumbled. "But you're all right, aren't you?"

"Luckily, it was better at turning people into little blue crystal statues than at putting up a good fight!" Mina yelped. "I could have been killed! Where were you guys?"

"But you didn't see it appear? You don't know if it came through a Portal?"

Mina stared at Amy incredulously. Then, in unnaturally calm tones, she said, "No, it was already here when I first saw it."

"Then it might not have been a youma," Amy concluded, sounding relieved. "It might have been something else entirely, like a cardian."

"Does it MATTER?!" Mina exploded. "Cardians were just as deadly as youma, remember?" Amy flinched.

"Look," I said hastily, "I admit it. We've gotten lazy, okay? But you **are** all right, aren't you?" She nodded grudgingly. "And did everyone else go back to normal when you destroyed it?" Another nod, a little easier this time. "So we'll go dig out our communicators and we'll be ready when the next one appears." There wasn't any point in thinking that this would be the only youma or cardian we'd have to deal with. They never appeared alone.

"You might have gotten hurt," Serena said, her eyes wide and starting to fill up with tears. "I'm sorry! I didn't think there'd be any more youma after what we did."

Mina was still on edge after what had happened this afternoon, but when Serena started to fret, she tried to cover it up. "Serena, I'm fine. It was just one youma. I practice a lot. I'm not letting them get me this time!" She smiled shakily. "Tell you what: you can turn the next one to moondust yourself. If I'd known you missed being Sailor Moon so badly, I'd have gone back to the phone and called you over so you could dust this one!" We all laughed as Serena made a face.

And it was like old times again. Amy started grilling Mina on every detail about the youma, entering the data in her computer. By the time she was satisfied, I felt like I'd fought the youma myself. But as she pointed out, it was kind of hard to identify a pattern from just one incident.

There wasn't much I could do at this point, not until a youma actually showed up in front of me. So I watched Amy analyzing the attack and found myself wondering what we were going to do without Raye. Not a fun thought. We'd have to think about new tactics. Usually Raye, Mina, and I had looked out for Amy and Serena, and that was going to be harder now that there were only two of us.

I was probably worrying about nothing. This hadn't been that strong a youma, not if Mina had finished it off all by herself. And Amy and Serena weren't exactly helpless. Let Serena get going with the Moon Sceptre, and she was majorly lethal. And when we'd tried to stop Darien that one time, Amy was the one who outmaneuvered him, not me.

It's still sort of embarrassing remembering that last bit.

But-as she never let us forget-Raye's powers had been pretty deadly. And none of the rest of us had much in the way of psychic gifts. We weren't getting any help from the sacred fire this time around.

_Yeah, we'll miss her. But it's not like we can't do anything if there are only four of us. Serena, Amy, and Raye were the only Sailor Scouts for months before I joined, and they did just fine._

Logical, right? I finally convinced myself I was worrying about nothing. We'd done this sort of thing before-we could handle a youma or two easy!

So we all got ready to be Sailor Scouts again. I dug my communicator out from under a pile of sweaters. Amy had taken hers apart to run an experiment on it. Luckily, she could put it back together (Mina thought it was beeping kind of funny now, but Amy insisted that she was imagining it). We ended up having to call Serena on hers so we could track the beeping noise through her house until we finally found it. How did she manage to drop it behind the washing machine?

And nothing happened. It didn't make any sense. Amy was frustrated because she didn't have anything new to analyze. Serena acted like we'd made her go to all this trouble to find her communicator for nothing. Mina muttered, "I didn't make this up, guys," when we asked her one too many times when she thought the next youma might show up. Me, I could hardly wait. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life fighting youma, but I figured it was time for a little payback for what they'd done to Raye . . .

We were all ready to go, and when the next attack came, we didn't stop it. The youma attacked a shrine on the other side of the city while we were at school. It didn't make the news until the evening, so we didn't hear about it until then. And there weren't any reliable witnesses; everyone who'd seen the youma had been caught in its attack, and they were pretty hysterical when they recovered. If you didn't know what youma were already, you weren't going to figure it out from what they said. The most we could tell was that it was made of reddish wood . . . maybe. Or maybe not. The one good thing that came out of the whole fiasco was that no one died. And that wasn't anything we could take credit for; the youma simply hadn't drained enough energy to kill anyone.

The information was too sketchy for Amy to put to any real use. Without more data, she's feeling useless. Everybody's nervous about the next attack, wondering if maybe we won't be able to do anything about it either, if it's been too long since we've seen any action. Of course, we're all pretending that we're not worrying about a thing. Hey-we're the Sailor Scouts. Even without Raye, we can handle youma.

Only . . . what if we can't?


	19. Chapter 19

19

"I can't," Amy whispers. "Not now. Not after I've put this much into it."

Part of me isn't surprised that she's saying that. But at the same time, I can't believe this is happening. Why can't she just let Raye go?

I stare at Amy, wondering what to do next. Drag her home? Not hardly-if nothing else, Serena and Mina would stop me, and anyway, Amy'd just try again later, only not tell me about it.

It's like something icy cold is settling in my stomach. I've gotten so used to watching Amy struggling to get the Portal open again that I've never really thought about what we'd do if she actually succeeded. Now it's beginning to sink in that may be exactly what has happened.

"Why are you doing this? After this long- **why** do you think Raye's still alive?" Amy opens her mouth to answer, but I cut her off. "No. I don't want to hear another chorus of 'I just have to know' or 'I can't let this go.' You tell me **exactly** why you think Raye is still alive!"

"Lita, back off."

"And what changed your mind, Venus?" I snap. "I thought you thought Raye was dead, too."

"I wouldn't know, okay?" Mina suddenly shouts, startling me. "I don't remember! All I've got is what you all told me. How am I supposed to decide if you're any more right than Mercury is, huh?" Her face is starting to turn red.

"You both want me to agree with you, but you're saying the exact opposite things! What, do you think I'm some sort of . . . of . . . judge or something, that I'm going to be able to magically figure out which one of you is right? I CAN'T REMEMBER THAT NIGHT! I'm probably never going to remember it! I'm sick of being caught between you two. You want some sort of decision from me, Lita? Okay, you've got it. I'm going to go for Mercury's version. And it's not because she has a better argument and it's not about either of you personally. But I need to believe that we can still fix this somehow."

Maybe Mina didn't mean for that to be personal, but it hurts just as much as if she did.

Artemis sighs. "First Mercury, and now Venus. Was there anything you wanted to yell about, Sailor Moon?" I wince. I guess everyone thinks I've been making enough noise without them needing to ask after me. But no one notices, since they're too busy watching Serena suddenly turn even redder than Mina.

"Er, no . . . " She fidgets nervously.

I am so tired of all this. Heck, I'm just tired, period. It's got to be what time by now? Would I be dealing with this better if I'd gotten more sleep? But in his own annoying little way, Artemis has a point. We may as well hear from Serena about this.

"So now what?" I ask her. "Do we go, or don't we?" Like I'm going to have to guess her answer.

"'We'?" She sounds majorly confused.

"Yes, 'we.'" _Look, I know when I've lost, okay? And I'm not going to just wish you all good luck, go back home to bed, and wait to get accused of your murders too. So just say we're going, and let's get it over with._

"I'm not going to make you go if you don't want to, Lita."

Well, that answers that.

"If it helps any," Amy murmurs, "I do have another reason for thinking that Raye's still alive."

"Huh?" I'd almost forgotten I'd been questioning her. Everyone else looks startled too. Apparently Amy hasn't shared whatever this is with anyone.

Hesitantly, she hands me something clenched in her fist. I clutch at it automatically, feel it brush softly against my fingers as Amy pulls her hand back, leaving something red in mine. I almost drop it as it spills over the side of my hand.

A small strip of bright red cloth.

And after gaping at it stupidly for a few seconds, I finally recognize it.

" **You** had it? You had Raye's bow all along, and you never told anyone?" I don't know whether to kiss her or strangle her with what's left of it. Which isn't much. What I'm holding is the right width, but it's less than a foot long. "What happened to the rest of it?"

Amy's eyes drift out of focus. "Later that morning . . . well, I came back. And I was looking around-I don't know-I guess I was trying to make myself believe that all of it had really happened. You were gone by then. And I saw the bow. Still stuck on the fence, you know? And I couldn't stand to see it there, like it was supposed to be on a gravestone or something, so I pulled it off the fence and . . . we couldn't get together for the longest time, and when we did . . . and we started telling Mina all about what had happened, and it just hurt too much and I didn't even think about it then. I couldn't even make myself look at it for the longest time. So it wasn't until much later that I realized what it might mean."

The whole time Amy's saying this, I keep running the ribbon between my fingers. Serena holds out her hand, silently asking me to let her see it. It's so hard to hand it over to her. It's like the blankie I had when I was little-I don't want to let go of it.

_Raye . . ._

"Because I still had it," Amy is saying. "It hadn't vanished or anything."

"But why does that make you think she's still alive?" Luna asks. "Perhaps it would have vanished if she'd transformed back to Raye, but if she hadn't . . . "

"I know. She wouldn't have transformed if she died right away. But it got me thinking about what our outfits can and can't do. So I started experimenting on mine." The faintest trace of what actually might be a grin flashes across her face. "You don't want to know how many of mine I destroyed! Along with a lot of Raye's ribbon as well. Anyway, they're not all that magical themselves. Makes sense in a way-the magic's mostly in **us,** not our clothes, right? But they have . . . it's an energy signature of sorts. It may have something to do with the disguise magic. A residual trace of-"

"Don't get technical, Mercury," Serena whines. "It's way too early in the morning to think."

"How about, 'If I look at our outfits through my visor, with my computer set a certain way, they look different from when I just use my eyes'?"

Serena grins, looking a bit sheepish.

"And they look different from each other. My outfits always look like each other, but they never look like Raye's bow, or your outfit or anyone else's."

"Uh, is this different than 'Yours is blue. Mine's blue and red. Jupiter's is green and pink.'?" Luna groans in exasperation.

"Look," Amy says patiently, "remember when I had the flu last winter?"

Oh, yeah. Amy had found some new theory to pursue and had gotten so little food or sleep for so long that when she finally got sick-surprise!-it kept her out of school for two weeks and threatened to turn into pneumonia. Who could forget that?"

"One day, when my mother was at work, I transformed. When I looked at the energy signature of my outfit while I was sick, it was a lot harder to detect. When I checked it again after I recovered, it was stronger." She glances at the red ribbon, now in Mina's hand, and says, very carefully, "Raye's ribbon still has an energy signature. It's almost as strong as any of ours."

Not even Serena needs that last connection spelled out for her. Mina suddenly squeezes the ribbon so tightly that it peeks out between her fingers like blood.

"It's not perfect evidence, Amy," Mina says after a bit, quietly. "How many months did it take you to discover the signature in the first place? And this isn't part of her outfit anymore. What if it's just 'remembering' what Raye's health was like right before Lita pulled it off?"

"I know! But how am I supposed to check it? The only way to prove that it's reflecting her current state of health would be to either find her alive or take someone else's bow and-" She shuts up abruptly. I don't blame her.

It'd be really tacky right now to talk about the possibility of any of the rest of us dying.

After a moment, she adds, "But that's why I think . . . why I **know.** Raye's still alive, Lita. Why I've done all this."

If this is true . . . no! She has to be wrong!

"Amy?" Luna asks slowly. "How crucial is this 6:43 time of yours? This has been a shock for all of us. Would we be able to do this later today, or even tomorrow?"

Amy stares at her computer a second before answering. Maybe everything's starting to catch up with her. "If you mean, is this the only time the Portal can ever be opened again, the answer is no. But it fluctuates. There are only a few times it can be detected, and even fewer when we'd be able to force it open. At 6:43, it will be about as close to us as it has ever been since I sealed it. One thunderbolt would be enough to break it open." She doesn't look at me at all. "A Crescent Beam might have the power . . . but if it didn't, the Portal would start oscillating wildly. There wouldn't be enough time for Venus to throw another in to open and stabilize it, and the energy from the first Crescent Beam would alter the Portal forever. It would take me another-I'd have to start all my calculations over again, almost from the very beginning!" Her voice cracks when she says that, but she forces it steady again and adds, "I can't say now when it would come this close to manifesting again. It could be later this afternoon, or tomorrow, or next year. I can't predict the fluctuations with much accuracy beyond a few hours into the future. But it can be opened in a few minutes."

"Only if I call a thunderbolt for you."

Amy somehow manages to go even stiller than she is already. "Yes."

And here we are, back where we started, because as far as I can tell, we still don't **know** that Raye's alive, and meanwhile, Amy's talking about opening the Portal up again and flooding us with youma. Which I'm about to point out to her, when something . . . **changes.** A look of determination comes into her face and she straightens up ever so slightly. And even though she's still too skinny and pale, and she's still got those dark circles under her eyes, I suddenly can't see her as sick or exhausted.

"But I **am** going," Amy states firmly. "If not today"-she glances at me briefly-"then next week, or next month, or whenever I can get the Portal open. Because I can't go on like this for the rest of my life."

"Then **don't**!" I protest. "Quit. Go study in Germany. Find Greg and ask him to go to a movie with you. Anything! No one is *making* you do this."

"I know."

"What do I have to do to get through to you? Why don't you get it? Amy, if you go back into the Negaverse, YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!"

Never mind that I just thought it would be tacky to talk about dying right now-there's no other way to put it. It's just that any time I've said something like this before, it's always felt like I was exaggerating. Not this time.

Amy swallows. "Maybe. Maybe not," she says, a bit shakily. "If Raye's survived for this long, I can probably keep myself alive too." We all know Amy's powers are nowhere near as lethal as Raye's-she's not even convincing herself, much less anyone else. "And anyway, Lita, could you honestly call what I've been doing for the last two years 'living'?"

"No," I answer finally. "But that's not a reason to . . . to . . . " I can't make myself finish the thought. Like saying it out loud will make it come true.

"To kill yourself." Serena's voice, and she's not sounding either ditzy or scared. "Amy, I want . . . I want Raye to be alive more than anything. I'd give **almost** anything to bring her back. But not your life."

"It can't be done without risk!" Amy argues. "The Negaverse is hardly safe, Serena."

"Uh-uhn." Serena is shaking her head. "The last time you said that, you . . . " She shudders. "We aren't just going to trade your life for hers!"

"What's this ' **I** can probably keep **myself** alive' crap?" Mina asks suspiciously. "Who said you could go and do this by yourself?"

"You shouldn't have to pay for my mistake." Amy's voice is bleak.

_This is not happening. Please, just let me wake up from this nightmare . . ._

"Stop it," I rasp. "Amy, if I could undo any of this, I'd make sure Raye made it back home in the first place. But if I couldn't do that, then I'd make sure I never, EVER, said that horrible thing about it all being your fault! I was wrong!"

"No. You were right. **I** left Raye behind. Not you, not Serena, not Mina. **I** did."

Tears are rolling silently down Serena's cheeks, and she's obviously trying to find something to say, but it's not working. I see her problem. What can you say to someone who hates herself this badly?

I stare at her in a kind of dread. We may . . . or may not . . . oh gods . . . have lost Raye, but I can't pretend any longer that we aren't losing Amy.

She's a scientist at heart-she trusts logic. And her logic is telling her that she is the only one to blame for this mess. Because Amy Mizuno knows that she's brilliant, and believes that brilliant people don't make such stupid little mistakes. Even though she was exhausted, injured, terrified, she should have been perfect. So logically, she's the only one who can be held responsible for Raye's . . fate. Whatever it was. Mina had escaped, I'd sent Serena through, Amy'd pushed me through-and then there was no one left to catch her mistake in time. There's no one else for her to blame.

Only she's wrong about that too.

"Raye."

They turn and look at me, confused.

_Shut up-just shut up! You don't say this sort of thing. Not about a friend, not someone who's dead!_

_But she may not_ _**be** _ _dead . . ._

"Raye had something to do with this too, you know." It's like when I was trying to tell Raye about dying: I can't seem to get enough air to talk with. "I said . . . I **said** we all had to stick together if we were going to make it out of the Negaverse. I know she heard me. But she had to prove she wasn't scared, when anyone with any sense would have been terrified! She just **had** to prove that she wasn't scared and that she was the strongest of us all in a fight, so does she go through the Portal when she gets the chance? Noooo! She goes off in the opposite direction! Just to save her stupid **pride** , and that's probably the exact same thing that got her killed when we went off to face Queen Beryl, and . . . and . . . **and dammit, Raye Hino, you had BETTER be dead, because I am going to kill you myself when I get my hands on you**!"

Amy stares at me, wide-eyed, like I've suddenly gone mad. I can't breathe. Desperately, I try to pull in air. It goes in with a ghastly 'whoop' . . . and comes out sounding even worse.

I'm crying. I haven't done it in so long, I almost don't recognize the sound, but I guess everyone else does, because suddenly I'm being hugged almost to death. Not that I'm not paying all that much attention to anything around me.

_Why?_ _**Why** _ _didn't you go through the Portal? You could have escaped! But no, you had to go and get yourself lost, and your grandfather thinks you hate him, and Chad's all weird now, only it's not funny anymore, and Amy's trying to kill herself because she thinks it's all her fault! You stubborn, self-_ _centered little brat! How_ _**dare** _ _you do this to us?!_

But it's not all Raye's fault either, even if I can finally admit that she wasn't blameless. It has been horrible to believe she died, but if Amy is right, Raye has been trapped in the Negaverse for almost two years and not only have I done nothing to help her, I've tried to stop Amy.

_"Scared, Mars?"_

Would she have gone through the Portal if I hadn't said that?

_I want you back. It isn't the same. You argue about everything and_ _you've probably got a bigger ego than Serena does, but I want you back, Raye!_ _I miss you . . ._

Eventually the worst of it passes. I'm still sniffling majorly and keepmhaving to wipe tears away, but at least I've stopped making those horrible noises.

Funny. I feel lighter inside somehow. It doesn't make sense. I've never felt better after any of my fights at school, so why I do now after basically just getting royally pissed off at Raye and bawling all over the place, I don't know. But there isn't time to worry about that now.

"What time is it?" I croak.

"6:39," Amy says anxiously. "But-"

Not too late after all.

"Jupiter . . . POWER!"

Girls and cats scatter as the world vanishes in bluish-white light.

And I'm Sailor Jupiter.

It's . . . it's incredible. I've been such an idiot-how could I have given this up for so long? I can feel energy pulse through me, and all the sleepiness burns away in a flash.

"See? I **told** you you'd miss being Sailor Jupiter." Mina is smirking. I give her a dirty look and she giggles.

"6:40." Amy touches her earring and her visor slides across her face. "Who's got the ribbon? Tracing that energy signature may be the only way to locate Raye." Serena waves the ribbon in the air for a second before putting it away. Maybe leaving the ribbon in the hands of the girl who misplaced the

Crescent Moon Wand at least twice isn't the best idea in the world-but I bet Raye's ribbon means a lot more to her than that wand ever did.

"Mercury? Where am I supposed to aim this thunderbolt?"

She glances back at me. "I'm going to send a signal to the Portal to open it. That should be enough to trigger it. Aim for the greatest distortion you can see." She points to an area just in front of her, and goes back to her computing. I really think I'd feel better about this if her directions were a bit more precise. After all this, I'd hate to screw the whole thing up just because I might not see this "distortion" the way she'll be able to with her visor.

"6:41."

"Hey, do you even still remember how to call a thunderbolt?"

"Very funny, Venus!"

"Girls?" Luna and Artemis call us together. "Good luck." Serena suddenly swoops down on Luna and hugs her so tightly that she starts gasping for air. Artemis rubs against Mina's legs, a gesture of affection he usually wouldn't be caught dead doing when he's trying to come across as the All-Knowing Counsellor. And then Luna wriggles free of Serena, and they're dashing to safer observation positions by the fence.

It isn't just the transformation that's got me this energized. The adrenaline is up and going by now. Which means this first thunderbolt should be a doozy . . .

"6:42."

I move up next to Amy. Behind us, Serena and Mina stop their whispering.

"I'll send the signal at 6:43 exactly. After that, as soon as possible, okay?"

I nod.

This could be a major mistake. Whether or not Raye's alive, there's a pretty good chance that we won't be if we go through with this.

There's no way those two youma who attacked recently were the only ones. Even though we've never heard of another one since the red wooden one, that doesn't mean there aren't any more. Maybe they're just not on a very urgent schedule this time around. If we don't make it back, who's going to stop them?

Gods, I'm only sixteen. I don't want to die-

"Lita?" Amy's murmur is so quiet I barely hear it.

"Huh?"

She looks over at me for a second. I can't really get a good look at her face because of her visor. "Thank you."

I should say something, I know I should say something, but before I can think of anything, she says, louder, " . . . and fifty seconds."

Oh yeah. I'm supposed to be doing something, aren't I?

"Fifty-three. Fifty-four."

I cross my arms in front of me and a breeze springs up, ruffling my hair.

"Jupiter . . . "

I can feel the tiara shift ever so slightly on my forehead as the lightning rod extends.

"Fifty-six."

" . . . Thunder . . ."

The breeze is now a wind strong enough to pull my ponytail up above my head and my tiara is vibrating with the energy crackling around it. It's taking all my strength to hold the power back, to let it build.

There's no feeling in the world like this.

"Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine . . . **6:43**!" I'm just barely aware of Amy's finger stabbing at a button on her computer. A few feet ahead of us, the air suddenly ripples slightly, like with heat distortion.

" . . . CRASH!"

And I release the lightning. It hits the patch of rippling air and vanishes without a sound.

Nothing happens.

_C'mon . . ._

The air stops shimmering. This can't be good.

_Please. For Raye._

Beside me, Amy draws in a shuddering breath.

_For Amy . . . c'mon . . . open . . ._

Nothing.

_No . . ._ _**no** _ _. . . oh, Amy . . ._

Amy lets her arms drop to her sides, and just stares blankly at where the shimmer used to be.

Then, with a noise like a sonic boom, the Portal explodes open. Startled, we all jump back.

The Portal was hardly reassuring the last time I saw it: pitch black and utterly silent. I'd take that any day compared to this thing. The center is still black, but now the edges are billowing out and shrinking randomly. I can't focus on the edges; when I try to force myself to look at them, my eyes start watering madly and my head hurts. I swear, there are colors there that don't exist in our world.

"Is it supposed to look like that?" Mina asks doubtfully.

Amy whips her head away, dissolving her visor and wiping at her eyes furiously. "I don't know! The readings I'm getting from the center are within normal parameters, but the edges-every reading is utter gibberish!"

"Yes or no-will that thing get us into the Negaverse?" I yell, even though the noises this thing is making aren't all that loud. But like those weird colors, they're nerve-wracking: just a bit lower or higher than human ears can handle.

Amy hesitates. "Probably." Nobody asks if it's going to stay open until we need to leave. Hey, why worry about youma and the Negaverse? Chances are, this so-called Portal will kill us itself.

Amy puts her computer away, freeing up her hands. Of course she's going through with this. And when she goes, Serena and Mina will be right behind her.

You know, her powers really aren't all that dangerous. Besides, even transformed, she's too worn out to be fully alert. I bet if she looked at her own energy signature right now, it'd be pretty pathetic. So it only makes sense that someone bigger and stronger go through first, right?

Anyway, I owe her that much at least for not believing her.

I take a step forward. The Portal flares. I try to look only at the center.

The four of us who got out were luckier than we had any right to be. No promises that it'll happen again. So common sense is yelling at me to turn around, get Amy to close this thing down, and go home. But I guess we can't run away from this any longer, not without ending it one way or another. Amy was right all along: we have to know.

_"Scared, Jupiter?"_

Yeah. But I'm even more scared of finding out just how much more we can screw things up if we don't do this.

"Let's go."

And, hearing the others gather themselves for the leap, I close my eyes and throw myself into the Portal.


End file.
